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School Closure Impact on Travel Patterns

While another story examined who lives where across the district, this story examines what happens when schools close and children must relocate.

Transportation costs are a specific school closure criterion. We analyze those costs by examining traffic burden and the conversion of walkers to car or bus riders. The maps that follow visualize where students are currently enrolled and which schools have capacity to absorb them under closure scenarios.

How we measure impact

For every 100-meter pixel in the district, Dijkstra’s shortest-path algorithm computes driving time to each school via the OpenStreetMap road network. When a school closes, students route to their next-nearest school. Census child counts (ACS) are distributed to each pixel using dasymetric allocation, then traced along shortest paths to estimate traffic volume per road segment.

Note: Glenwood Elementary is a district-wide magnet school whose programs serve students from across the district rather than a specific neighborhood. Because closure scenarios depend on neighborhood-level travel patterns, Glenwood is not highlighted in this analysis.
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Future School Capacity at a Glance

Enrollment numbers help inform current and future transportation costs. Seawell has the lowest projected enrollment number among the schools considered for closure with 325 in the year 2030. Therefore, Seawell may have the fewest students affected by closure, indicating the fewest displaced students. LEAP is a districtwide program for 4th and 5th graders that already pulls many of these students from other attendance zones.

Source: Projected 2030 enrollment from the PMR2 Forecast (UNC Carolina Demography); capacity figures are pre-Woolpert.
Limitation: These are projections, not actuals. Actual numbers may differ.
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Transportation: Who Can Walk?

Transportation costs can also be examined by the net change in students needing a change in mode of transportation. The biggest increase in cost would be the conversion of walk zone students to school bus eligible students.

The 2025 Chapel Hill Safe Routes to School Action Plan measured how many students live within 0.5 miles of each school:

Closure cost asymmetry: Closing Ephesus converts at least 99 walkers into bus/car riders. Given that the majority of Seawell students live >1 mile away, the expectation is that there will be significantly fewer conversions.
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Estimating Added Transportation Costs

On average, it costs $900 per student annually for a bus rider (NC state average values). If we converted all students potentially eligible for walking (living within 1 mile of school) to bus riders, we can roughly calculate the added transportation cost for a school closure.

Ephesus Closure

99 students live within 0.5 miles; 93 live within 0.5–1 mile.
192 total students × $900 = $172,800 added annually

Seawell Closure

0 students live within 0.5 miles; 60 live within 0.5–1 mile.
60 total students × $900 = $54,000 added annually

Importantly, these figures represent only the net change — the additional cost of converting current walkers to bus riders. The total transportation cost for either closure would likely be even greater, as accommodating entire new neighborhoods may require adding new buses to the fleet.

When state and federal funding is unpredictable and gas prices wildly fluctuate, we would want to minimize how much we rely on bussing.

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Random Sampling of Travel Mode

Proximity to school does not always capture travel mode choice. However, random sampling shows that Ephesus has the second most active travelers (walkers + bikers) in Chapel Hill elementary schools (comparable data for elementary schools in Carrboro were not readily available).

Source: Chapel Hill Safe Routes to School Action Plan (adopted June 11, 2025) — arrival/dismissal tally counts (Fall 2024)
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From Walkers to Roads: How We Model Traffic

Reading the traffic maps

The maps on the following slides color each road by how much its student traffic changes when a school closes:

Red/orange — more children on this road after closure
Blue — fewer children (traffic that used to go to the closed school disappears from its access roads)
Thicker lines = larger change. Thin, faint lines = small change.
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Seawell Closure: Current Students (Ages 5–9)

If Seawell closes, its elementary-age students (5–9) redistribute to nearby schools. The map shows the change in student traffic compared to the baseline (all schools open):

More children on road
Fewer children on road
Reading the map: The faint, thin lines on the map indicate that traffic impacts are light — the lighter and thinner the line, the smaller the change in student traffic on that road segment.

Roads with the largest traffic change:

LEAP program context (editorial): Seawell currently hosts the LEAP program — a district-wide accelerated learning program where students are already bussed from across the district. These students already travel long distances; closure shifts their routes but doesn’t fundamentally change their travel burden. The inconvenience falls most heavily on attendance zone families who currently walk or drive short distances. No LEAP enrollment data exists in this dataset — this context is editorial, not computed.
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Seawell Closure: Future Students (Ages 0–4)

Now the same scenario viewed through the lens of children under 5 — future kindergarteners who will need school capacity in coming years.

Reading the map: The faint, thin lines on the map indicate that traffic impacts are light — the lighter and thinner the line, the smaller the change in student traffic on that road segment.

Roads with the largest traffic change:

The pattern is similar to the 5–9 analysis but at lower magnitude. Once again, Seawell’s zone is not expected to have as high an enrollment of elementary-age students per ACS Census data — fewer young children live near Seawell compared to schools in the eastern district.

For a deeper look at the demographic patterns behind these numbers, see the Socioeconomic Demographics story.

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Ephesus Closure: Current Students (Ages 5–9)

If Ephesus closes, the traffic redistribution is substantially wider. The map shows changes for elementary-age children (5–9):

More children on road
Fewer children on road

Roads with the largest traffic change:

The wider spread of affected roads reflects Ephesus’s position in one of the most population-dense areas of the district.

Notice that the routing algorithm redirects most of the southern Ephesus attendance zone toward Glenwood rather than Rashkis, even though Rashkis is geographically closer. This is because Glenwood is more readily accessible via the road network, while Rashkis is nestled at the back of a subdivision with limited through-routes.

This has a compounding implication. Closing Glenwood in addition to Ephesus would impact high population-density areas with a high proportion of young children.

Attendance zone overlap: A significant portion of Rashkis’s current attendance zone is “borrowed” from the Ephesus drive zone — meaning students in those areas already share the same traffic corridors. Closing Ephesus would concentrate even more student traffic onto those already-shared roads.
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Ephesus Closure: Future Students (Ages 0–4)

For children under 5, the Ephesus closure creates even larger per-road impacts than the 5–9 analysis. As rising kindergarteners enter elementary school, the traffic burden from an Ephesus closure would be expected to grow worse over time — not better.

Roads with the largest traffic change:

These are future kindergarteners — removing capacity in Ephesus’s zone means removing it where future demand is greatest.

Comparing closure scenarios: Across both age groups, closing Ephesus produces a wider spread of affected roads, higher per-road traffic increases, and concentrates the burden on already-busy corridors. Closing Seawell redistributes fewer students across a smaller, less congested portion of the network. The traffic evidence reinforces the transportation cost gap identified by the walkability analysis.
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What the Data Shows

Three key findings from the closure analysis:

  1. Ephesus closure creates larger traffic impacts than Seawell across the road network
  2. Closing Ephesus converts significantly more walkers to bus/car riders than closing Seawell
  3. Closing eastern schools (Ephesus and Glenwood) creates a school desert in the most child-dense part of the district

Data sources: NCES EDGE 2023-24 • ACS 5-Year • OpenStreetMap road network • Orange County parcel data • UNC Carolina Demography (PMR2 Forecast)

Return to the homepage for interactive maps and full methodology guides.

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Addendum: Updated Enrollment Forecast

The newest Carolina Demography report (April 2026 BOCC agenda) was published after the creation of this story map. The 10-year forecast through 2035-36 is the most optimistic the district has seen, projecting total elementary enrollment to remain essentially flat (dropping only ~2.6% from 4,294 to 4,184 over the decade).

Critically, growth is most prominently concentrated in the northeast of the district. Ephesus is projected to grow by 23% over the decade — from 343 to 423 students — the largest increase of any elementary school. Glenwood is similarly projected to grow by 8%. This further supports the case that Ephesus needs to remain open to serve the northeast corridor, which is where the district’s student growth is concentrated.

The capacity projections below show that Ephesus is forecast to reach 97% of capacity by 2029-30 — essentially full — while Glenwood is projected to exceed 100% capacity by 2029-30 and remain there through 2035-36.

Percent capacity by school 2025-26 through 2035-36

Source: Carolina Demography at UNC-CH, Student Membership Forecast 2025-26 through 2035-36 (April 2026 BOCC agenda, Attachment 1).