The School District Has Started a Review That Could Close Schools in 2028

The Lake Washington School District has opened a review of enrollment, school capacity and attendance boundaries. Closing or combining schools is one of the options, and any change takes effect in September 2028.

In short

  • The district opened the review at a board study session on August 17 and emailed families two days later.

  • Nothing changes for at least two years. Approved changes take effect September 2028.

  • Kirkland's schools are fuller than the district average. The emptiest buildings are in Redmond.

What happened

On the morning of August 19, families got an email from Superintendent Jon Holmen with two announcements in it. One was a new phone policy. The other was that the district is beginning a review that could end with schools closing.

The review started at a school board study session on August 17. Staff walked the board through seventy pages of enrollment history, capacity projections and process design. Two days later the district still had not posted any of it to its public news page, so for most people that email was the first word of it.

What the district is reviewing

During this school year, the district will look at enrollment and capacity, attendance boundaries, where the highly capable program is housed, how much it relies on portable classrooms, and whether one or more schools should be combined or closed.

The problem statement in the district's own materials reads: "Lake Washington School District is experiencing shifts in student enrollment due to demographic changes, declining birth rates, and evolving housing patterns. These changes are creating misalignment between where students live, the capacity of school facilities, and how district resources are distributed across schools."

Five approaches are on the table, and the district says they may be used alone or in combination. It can redraw attendance boundaries. It can move the highly capable program. It can remove or relocate portables. It can repurpose space inside buildings for other district programs. And it can combine school communities or stop operating a school altogether.

The work runs in two phases. The first decides whether closure should be considered at all. The second develops specific options if it is. Any change that gets approved takes effect in September 2028.

Why this is happening

The district grew enormously and then stopped.

Between 2008 and 2019, enrollment rose 31%, more than 7,300 students. In five years the district went from the sixth largest in Washington to the second largest. It opened three new schools, rebuilt and enlarged five, and added onto ten more.

Since 2019 it has lost 945 students. Almost all of that is in elementary school, where enrollment peaked at 15,342 and has fallen to 13,044.

The clearest way to see it is by counting schools rather than students. In 2019, nine of the district's 29 elementary schools had more than 600 students and six had fewer than 400. By 2025, two had more than 600 and ten had fewer than 400. Three now have fewer than 300.

Two forecasts are in play, and they cover different spans. The capital facilities plan the board adopted in June projects a loss of 2,892 students by 2031, bringing the district to 27,263. The longer forecast staff presented in February runs to 2035 and has enrollment down 14.8%, with middle schools taking the worst of it at 22%.

Births inside district boundaries have declined every year since 2016, and they've fallen faster here than in King County as a whole. A birth in 2016 is a kindergartner in 2021 and a high school senior in 2034, so this is a slow-moving thing the district can see coming a long way off.

What kind of housing gets built matters

The district tracks how many children arrive from each type of new home, and it publishes the numbers in its capital facilities plan. The 2026 figures, in school-age children per home:

  • Single-family house — 0.746

  • Townhome, duplex or multiplex — 0.199

  • Apartment or condo — 0.069

A hundred new houses bring about 75 children. A hundred new townhomes bring about 20. A hundred new apartments bring about 7.

The middle category is the one to watch in Kirkland, because middle housing is what state law now requires the city to allow in most neighborhoods. Those homes produce roughly a quarter of the children that a detached house does.

Our schools primer carries these numbers alongside the rest of the district picture.

That's the pattern in the aggregate. It isn't a rule about any particular building, and Kirkland already has an example running the other way. At the August 17 session, district staff said a newly opened apartment development inside Bell Elementary's attendance area is bringing in enough students that the district will likely need to move preschool classrooms out of Bell next fall, well ahead of anything the 2028 process decides. A low rate multiplied by a large number of units still adds up, and Bell is a small building that's already over capacity.

So the honest version is narrower than it first sounds. Housing type shapes how many children a neighborhood sends to school, and it's one of three things the district named. Declining births is the one it named first.

What this looks like at Kirkland's schools

The district's projections run by high school region. Two of them cover Kirkland. The figures below are utilization of permanent capacity, which excludes portables.

  • Juanita region (Bell, Frost, Juanita, Keller, Muir, Sandburg, Thoreau, Finn Hill Middle, Kamiakin Middle, Juanita High) — 91% this year, projected 81% by 2035

  • Lake Washington region (Audubon, Franklin, Kirk, Lakeview, Rose Hill, Rush, Twain, Kirkland Middle, Rose Hill Middle, Lake Washington High) — 97% this year, projected 87% by 2035

  • Redmond region — 90% this year, projected 69% by 2035, leaving roughly 2,482 empty seats

Kirkland is not the empty part of the district. Four of Redmond's elementary schools are projected below 55%. Three Kirkland elementary schools are projected to stay above capacity the whole period: Bell, Lakeview and Rush. The buildings emptying fastest here are middle schools, with Kamiakin projected at 66% and Kirkland Middle at 70%.

Kamiakin's number deserves a footnote. Voters approved a $676.9 million construction levy in November 2024 that rebuilds and enlarges it from 570 seats to 900, with completion expected in 2029. The building gets bigger while the forecast for students in it gets smaller.

The strongest argument against reading this as a decline story

Bellevue went through this and the trend turned. It closed two elementary schools in 2023 for the same stated reasons, then saw enrollment stabilize and rise, and in October 2025 it called off the middle school consolidation it had been weighing. The two elementaries stayed closed. The rest of the plan didn't happen.

The forecast is already running low. The district's consultant projected 1,737 kindergartners for this fall. The district now expects between 1,800 and 1,825.

The capacity percentages will move. Buildings that converted classrooms to other uses during the growth years can convert them back, which changes what "full" means.

And this is a buildings problem more than a money problem. In the district's own budget accounting, enrollment loss accounts for about $2.8 million of a $26.9 million shortfall over the next four years. State-mandated compensation costs and ordinary fixed cost increases account for far more. Local levy authority has actually risen every year since 2019, because the per-student cap is adjusted for inflation and those adjustments have outrun the student losses.

The paragraphs above are our reading of the district's documents, not the district's characterization.

How this gets decided, and where residents fit

Most of what could change never reaches a public vote.

A committee will do the analysis and make recommendations to the superintendent. The superintendent recommends attendance area configurations to the school board. The board adopts them.

The board votes on two things: new attendance boundaries, and an actual school closure. Everything else on the list is administrative. Where the highly capable program sits, whether preschool classrooms move, which portables come out, how choice schools handle enrollment, all of that gets decided by staff and never appears as a board action. If you're waiting for a vote to weigh in on those, there won't be one.

Parents will not be on the committees. Staff told the board that in past boundary processes, parent members were pressured by neighbors over the recommendations they made. Public participation happens through open houses instead, the first expected in early December and a second later in the process.

If a closure does get proposed, state law adds requirements the rest of the process doesn't have. Under RCW 28A.335.020, the district must adopt a policy providing for citizen involvement, produce a written analysis of the effects of the closure, hold hearings during the 90 days before a final decision, hold a separate hearing for every individual school proposed for closure, and publish notice once a week for two consecutive weeks. The district says it will update its closure policy as part of this work.

What happens next

Committee members are selected in September and meetings begin in October. The school board takes the topic up again at a study session on October 5, where staff will lay out the committee process and the first round of analysis. The first open house is expected in early December, with a final recommendation in March 2027. Approved changes take effect September 2028.

If you want to follow this closely, the October 5 study session is the one to watch. It's where the criteria get set, and criteria decide outcomes long before anyone names a school.

Sources & city records

Last updated: August 2026. Every link below goes to a primary source, so you can check the record yourself.

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