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Puerto Rico’s Debt Crisis Claims Another Casualty: Its Schools

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And so, like 178 other schools across the island, it is set to close after the last day of the school term this week, in part to help Puerto Rico battle debt and pension obligations of $123 billion. The school, perched alongside a winding two-lane road 1,400 feet above sea level, will join the many casualties of a fiscal crisis that forced Puerto Rico to declare a form of bankruptcy last week and sent hundreds of thousands of people packing in the past decade. The school will join the shuttered businesses and abandoned homes as yet another indicator of the emergency gripping Puerto Rico and the desperate efforts to stop the hemorrhaging. For some, the closings represent not just another chip at Puerto Rico’s national budget, but also an opportunity to transform a struggling education system in which some schools are infested with termites, enrollment has dropped by nearly a third since 2010, and just 10 percent of eighth graders passed the standardized math test.”

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