Equity/"Equity" versus efficiency and the school closure debate

I've mentioned that Salt Lake City is in the process of closing schools ("School closure and consolidation planning needs to focus on integration planning at the outset as a separate process").  

Enrollment of elementary school aged kids has dropped by 6,000 over the past 10 years, and the State Legislature has ordered the district to right size the number of elementary schools in response.

The way the city grew pre-1960s, there are a lot of schools concentrated in what is termed central city.  Even though the area is dense, and the city is growing in population, the number of households with children is declining, decreasing demand for classrooms.  Whereas when schools were built, they ended up being concentrated, because at the time there were lots of families with children.

On the other hand, on the east side of the city, schools are less concentrated so if a school is closed the distance a student will have to travel to another school is significantly increased or otherwise difficult.  

There is an op-ed in the Salt Lake Tribune, "Salt Lake school closures feels reminiscent of ‘The Hunger Games’," making the argument that equity demands that schools on the east side should be closed too, not just schools in the core.

I have made an equity argument before, although I didn't use that word, in arguing that strong neighborhoods are built around quality neighborhood schools ("National Community Planning Month: Schools as neighborhood anchors") and sometimes, when enrollment drops, it might be worth keeping a school open regardless because of its community impact.

But in the Salt Lake Schools case, the issue is efficiency--closing schools in an area where there is a preponderance of them, where there are other schools nearby that the students can attend--versus equity--closing schools across the city even if it isn't efficient and more costly, because it's unfair to make one particular area suffer most of the change.

I am on the efficiency side.

But it's interesting that equity is used as an argument generally, without acknowledging that sometimes it's just about cost, not unfairness.  

Note too in this case, it is about geographical and income equity, and much less about racial and demographic equity--although schools on Salt Lake's west side will also be "disproportionately" closed too, again because of demographics, not out of targeting.

The author uses low income students (Title I) as a proxy.  From the article:

The 25% schools with the lowest percent of low-income students are: Ensign (1.28%), Bonneville (8.24%), Uintah (9.18%), Indian Hills (13.25%), Highland Park (17.04%), Beacon Heights (18.21%) and Dilworth (20.22%). Combined, these schools served 376 Free Lunch students, which is 7.5% of the total Free Lunch students served in the SLCSD in 2022. 

Instead, the short-listed schools were selected west from the great divide in the central east and central west areas of SLCSD. Our tributes — Emerson, Hawthorne, Bennion, Riley, Jackson, Newman and Wasatch Elementaries — were reportedly identified through evaluation of all 27 SLCSD elementary schools, yet they are remarkably all geographically located west of the 25% most affluent neighborhoods and in two distinct lines that transect SLCSD, almost stacked like dominos, disproportionately impacting central east and central west neighborhoods.

It's an interesting argument, pitting middle class income whites against higher income whites (the area to the east is the highest income zip code in Salt Lake City).

Is it inequitable that a white household making $160,000 or more per year faces school closure and that a white household making $200,000 or more per year does not?