Thousands of the state’s public schools are closing for summer break, but there are two schools — set next to farms in central Wisconsin — that won’t reopen in the fall or ever again.

“We had to make the difficult decision to shut the doors of two of our rural schools,” said Josh Sween, administrator of the Portage Community School District. “This is definitely the worst day of my career as an educator, and I think it’s one of the darkest days in the history of Portage.”

He says the decision to close two elementary schools – one in Marquette County and the other in Columbia County – couldn’t be avoided.

“Purely for budgetary reasons — and that is something that’s going on all over the state,” Sween explained.

He said the district did try to keep Lewiston and Endeavor elementary schools open as long as they could.

“The issue is funding, right? We just don’t have the funding to be able to do that. If we did, we would have,” Sween said.

After a referendum asking voters for more money failed in the spring 2026 election, the school district made the difficult decision.

Portage isn’t alone. In the 2024-25 school year, school districts in several rural counties – including Dunn, Vilas, Jefferson, Richland, Juneau and others — all closed at least one school. The school year before that, another handful of schools in other, lesser populated counties also closed.

And earlier in 2026, the Hustisford school board in Dodge County voted to completely dissolve the school district, which means the elementary, middle and high schools will all close before a new school year starts.

Education experts say that the impact of school closures on small communities is very painful.

“A rural school is the heart and soul and the identity of a community,” said Bradley Carl, who studies rural school systems at the UW-Madison Wisconsin Center for Education Research.

He said that part of the reason that small, rural schools are so missed when they close is because they do so much so well.

“Things like small class sizes and strong relationships between teachers and students, and strong relationships between school districts and employers in the community,” Carl said.

Services beyond the regular school day are important for working parents.

“School districts also provide after school care and before school care and summer programs, and that has an economic impact in terms of allowing families to work,” Carl shared.

Schools in rural areas can also be a social hub for the community.

“Everyone goes to the basketball games on Friday night or the football games on Friday night, but it’s so much more than that, too,” he added. “It’s going to the theater productions and the homecoming parades.”

School closures are not unique to rural areas. Over the last 20 years, more than 600 public schools across Wisconsin have closed. But nearly 40% of them have been in small, rural counties of less than 100,000 residents. In all, that’s around 250 rural schools that have closed.

As was the case in Portage, there’s just not enough money to keep the doors open — and that’s usually because there are fewer students enrolled.

“Two-thirds, maybe three-quarters of the rural districts in Wisconsin, as is the case around the country, are facing declining enrollment,” Carl explained. “Given the way we fund schools, declining enrollment means declining revenue from the state.”

Figures from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction show that student enrollment in public schools has declined roughly 7% over the last two decades.

Population experts agree that this is a nationwide problem largely due to shrinking birth rates.

“Declining enrollment is real, and it’s a challenge,” said Jeff Eide.

He knows the problems facing rural school districts better than most as the executive director of the Wisconsin Rural Schools Alliance.

“Seventy percent of the schools in the state are rural — so we have a lot of rural schools. Not the majority of the students are within our rural areas, but,” Eide said, “that’s a large footprint in Wisconsin.”

He said rural schools are doing their best.

“They are working their buns off, they’re working hard to do the best they can with the resources that they have,” Eide continued.

He added that what the state provides in per student funding isn’t 100% of what a school needs to operate – so districts pull in money from local government and property taxes to make up the difference.

Over the years, more and more small and rural communities are having to go to ballot referendums to ask residents for more funding to keep their schools open.

“I do see school referendums at this time as a continuing trend, unfortunately,” Eide said. “I’m hoping one day that it becomes an anomaly and not a need.”

Another factor is the rising cost of everything – from gas for buses to heating and cooling costs to buildings and even playground maintenance, as well as school supplies and the need for new technology. It’s simply becoming more and more expensive to educate students.

“I think everybody’s struggling with the funding formula that we currently have,” Sween said.

Sween and Eide agree that changes to the state’s school funding formula are needed, like a per-student rate increase tied to inflation. That element was a part of the school funding formula more than a decade ago, but state lawmakers discontinued the practice back during the Great Recession.

“We need to make sure we’re doing the best we can to meet the rate of inflation. We haven’t done that for many years,” Eide said.

“If inflationary increases had continued from 2009 to the end of this biennium, we would not have a gap of — it’s $3,573 per student – that we would have gotten in state aid or that per pupil revenue,” Sween said.

But in order for there to be a change in the school funding formula at the state level, legislators and the governor would need to agree on what those changes would be.

“There’s a lot of challenges in a rural district — also, there’s really great things about a small or rural school,” said state Rep. Karen DeSanto, D-Baraboo.

In the Wisconsin Assembly, DeSanto represents the area that includes the Portage Community School District where two schools are closing. She says such schools are a draw for residents.

“When a school falters, especially in a very small rural community, it affects everyone,” DeSanto said. “If a school is not there in a smaller community, it discourages people to live there.

She is open to changes in school funding.

“Our budgets are based on our values as Wisconsinites. Our values are to support our kids in public education and we are not doing that,” DeSanto said.

Across the political aisle, state Rep. Lindee Brill, R-Sheboygan Falls says state budgets need to be balanced.

“If we decide that education is a priority in our state, which I do believe our future generations is a priority, then we need to figure out where we’re cutting elsewhere,” she said.

As for changes to the state school funding formula, Brill said she is open to that as well.

“I do think we are well overdue to look at it now. That doesn’t mean a complete overhaul, but I do think we need to figure out if this is the best way to serve the state,” Brill said.

Unless there’s a compromise, school boards and administrators will continue to struggle — and keep asking voters for more money.

“At the end of the day, we still need to balance our budget and we don’t have the money to do it,” Sween said.

And in many cases, it’s all but certain that rural communities will keep closing schools.