School Closings for the Better?

    In Chicago, around 100 schools have been closed since 2001 and another 129 are being eyed for closure. Living on the North Shore and going to a school like New Trier, it's extremely hard to picture this is happening.
     Even if the schools that shut down were low on enrollment or struggling to afford to stay open, I still think it is important for schools, as this article states, to "serve as refuges in communities that have little else." The word refuge, meaning a condition of being safe or sheltered from pursuit, danger, or trouble, suggests that the students already live in a dangerous area, and it is made even more hazardous when their school closes, forcing them to walk or be bused further distances through more dangerous areas. For most students, closing down their school is not helping them to get a better education at another school, but mostly  just setting them up to be in an even worse situation.This is a sharp contrast to our lives at New Trier. We, at NT,  drive a maximum of 20 minutes to get to school and are in an extremely safe area. It would never cross our minds to be nervous about having to drive through Glencoe every morning, whereas for many students in the city, walking through their neighborhood every morning is a risk. Although we do not live in a town that has "little else," I would argue that New Trier also serves as a refuge, but in a different way than many of the schools downtown. Many students that attend Chicago Public Schools need their schools to serve as a safe place for them to go. On the other hand, at New Trier we take for granted the fact that there is pretty much always something going on and it's open to students many hours of the day, even when school isn't in session. We may not see New Trier as a "refuge" because there are already other safe places that we can go, including our homes, which may not be the case for some students in Chicago.
     According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 1,929 schools across the country were closed between the years 2010 and 2011. For me, this number was pretty hard to wrap my head around, and it made me think about how lucky I am to go to a school at which there is no possibility for it to shut down. What do you think it would feel like for your school to shut down?