A School Marked for Closure — and the Bold Strategy That Saved It

By 2021, Highwood Hills Elementary was in a crisis. With declining enrollment year after year, the district made the difficult decision to place it on a proposed school closure list.

For many schools, that would have been the end. But for Principal Dr. Fatima Lawson, that proposed closure pushed her and her team to take bold action and pull off something incredible: reverse the trend entirely.

This is the story of how Dr. Lawson and her team did it.

To hear the full story directly from Dr. Lawson herself, watch the recording via Zoom, Growing Enrollment: Lessons from Highwood Hills Elementary on Reversing the Trend.

The Challenge: A School on the Brink of Closure

Like many district schools across the country, Highwood Hills faced an uphill battle in attracting new students:

• Minnesota’s open enrollment policies allow families to choose schools outside their assigned district, giving them a wide range of options beyond their neighborhood school.
• St. Paul has a strong charter school presence. In fact, the city is actually home to the nation’s first charter school. These schools actively market themselves to families, offering specialized programs and targeted outreach that makes it even harder for schools like Highwood Hills to stand out.

Read the full case study, Reversing a Decade of Declining Student Enrollment at Saint Paul Public Schools, to learn how the district drove a historic enrollment turnaround, including the transformation at Highwood Hills.

Unfortunately, competition from other schools was only part of the enrollment problem. Highwood Hills faced an additional three barriers to increasing enrollment — but Dr. Lawson was determined to find a way forward.

Enrollment Challenge #1: An Out-of-the-Way Location

Nestled in a wooded area with only a handful of houses nearby (most of whom, Dr. Lawson notes, “do not have school-age children”), Highwood Hills lacks the visibility and natural foot traffic from which other schools benefit.

It’s simply not in a location that St. Paul residents naturally walk past, drive by, or discover on their own.

Enrollment Challenge #2: A Highly Mobile Community

Even within the school’s immediate neighborhood, Highwood Hills faces another enrollment challenge: constantly shifting family demographics.

The school’s student population comes primarily from two nearby apartment complexes, but families frequently move due to rising rent costs and restrictive housing policies.

With families coming and going so often, maintaining steady enrollment and building long-term relationships is difficult.

Enrollment Challenge #3: A Struggling Reputation

Highwood Hills battled another significant challenge: their reputation. The school was once labeled as a Comprehensive Support and Improvement school with Minnesota’s North Star Accountability System.

For many families, this label was a red flag that unintentionally discouraged new enrollments, which created a damaging cycle:

• Declining enrollment led to fewer resources
• Fewer resources made it hard to invest in school improvements
• Without improvements that could shift public perception, enrollment continued to decline

Meanwhile, nearby schools actively marketed themselves as high-performing alternatives, so the perception of Highwood Hills as an underperforming school only deepened.

Without intervention, Highwood Hills risked being trapped in an enrollment death spiral.

The Tipping Point

Everything came to a head in 2021 when, due to steadily declining student enrollment, Highwood Hills was slated for closure. For many schools, closure is the final chapter.

But for Dr. Lawson, it was a turning point.  It was a moment that could have marked the end of the school — but, instead, it became the catalyst for change.

“I didn’t know how we would do it,” says Dr. Lawson in the webinar. “But for some reason, I felt we could.”

The Strategy: A Community-Driven Approach to Growth

Rather than accepting the school’s fate, Dr. Lawson and her team took action, starting with the one group whose voices mattered most: families.

It was the community’s advocacy that had kept Highwood Hills off the closure list. Now, it was up to Highwood Hills to prove the school’s long-term viability and ensure history wouldn’t repeat itself.

As she explains in the webinar:

After we succeeded in saying the community fought for us, we were allowed to stay open.

We didn’t know what we wanted, because we knew we could not continue to be this limited community school and do the same thing but expect different results.

We’d seen other schools that were slated for closure. They allowed them to open for two years, and then boom. It happened again.

We did not want to fall into that pit.

Dr. Lawson understood that avoiding closure once wasn’t enough. If they wanted families to stay for the long run, Highwood Hills needed a transformation.

Getting Started

Dr. Lawson knew that if Highwood Hills were to survive, it had to be a school that families actively chose. So, to understand exactly what families wanted, she launched a series of informal meetings. These meetings let parents share their priorities for their children’s education.

To ensure every family could participate, Highwood Hills hosted meetings on campus outside of traditional work hours and made the meetings accessible by providing:

• Transportation Assistance: Families received rideshare vouchers. Additionally, staff (including Dr. Lawson herself!) earned Class C licenses so they could personally transport families. They even visited some families at their home.
• Food and Drinks: The school provided meals so that families could attend without worrying about meal preparation. “Not cookies and ice cream or chips and dip,” Dr. Lawson notes.
• Interpretation Services: Serving such a diverse, multilingual community, Highwood Hills ensured all families could participate by employing district interpreters for multiple languages.

These efforts removed logistical barriers and created an environment where families felt valued, opening the door to honest conversations that might’ve not happened otherwise.

Honoring Cultural Priorities

While Highwood Hills serves a diverse community, three key cultural communities make up most of the school’s student population: Somali, Karen, and Latino families.

During the family meetings, Dr. Lawson and her team realized that each community had distinct hopes for their children’s education — and that honoring those priorities would be key to reshaping Highwood Hills:

• Parents in the largest group at the school, the Somali community, wanted their children to become lawyers, doctors, and politicians.
• For the Karen community (whom, traditionally, were farmers), the conversation centered around agriculture. They wanted students to learn the science behind food production, environmental sustainability, and hands-on agriculture.
• Trade skills were key for the Latino community. Many parents worked in roofing, landscaping, and construction and wanted their children to take over family businesses or enter skilled trades with hands-on training.

Dr. Lawson took these insights back to the district to propose a new vision of Highwood Hills. And what they realized was that what the community wanted went beyond a traditional elementary school model.

“What they [were] asking for is something way bigger than what an elementary school will do,” Dr. Lawson explains in the webinar. “But we wanted to listen to them.”

The Birth of a Polytechnic Model

Now possessing a clear vision from the families themselves, Dr. Lawson and her team reimagined Highwood Hills — not as just a regular elementary school but as something entirely new: a polytechnic school.

Unlike traditional elementary models, this approach would integrate career exploration, hands-on learning, and practical skill development, aligning with the aspirations of the community.

However, a strong new vision wouldn’t be enough on its own. For this transformation to succeed, families needed to know about it.

Highwood Hills had a new story to tell. Now it was time to make sure families heard it.

Strengthening Outreach

While the community engagement efforts strengthened relationships with existing families, Highwood Hills still needed to attract new families and improve the enrollment experience.

The district was already in partnership with SchoolMint, and one of the services offered was enrollment training. Dr. Lawson participated in SchoolMint’s enrollment training, where she learned to:

• Communicate the school’s story so that families clearly understood what made Highwood Hills different from competing schools
• Improve the “customer service” experience for families inquiring about the school
• Follow up with interested families so that they don’t pursue enrollment elsewhere

“When I took [the enrollment training] course, I took everything to heart, and I’m still using those skills. I made a concerted effort, hard as it was, to make sure I didn’t miss any session,” Dr. Lawson explains in the webinar. “At that time, we were drowning. And I wanted to swim.”

Inspired by Dr. Lawson’s success? You can take the same enrollment training she did. SchoolMint’s Certified Enrollment Specialist course gives school leaders actionable strategies to increase enrollment. It’s free and designed to fit your schedule!

Going Beyond Traditional School Marketing

In addition to the enrollment training, Highwood Hills also partnered with SchoolMint’s social media advertising team to amplify their outreach efforts. For the first time, the school:

• Ran targeted social media ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram to promote the polytechnic offerings of Highwood Hills in St. Paul
• Used location-based advertising to reach families who might not have considered Highwood Hills before

For the first time, Highwood Hills wasn’t just hoping families would find them; they were making sure of it. Through targeted social media campaigns, the school’s transformation was no longer a best-kept secret but instead a story reaching families right where they were.

The Results: A Remarkable Turnaround

The impact of Dr. Lawson’s community-driven approach, combined with strategic enrollment training and digital marketing support, was nothing short of transformational.

In addition to coming out of state-mandated improvement status, Highwood Hills also reversed the enrollment trend that once put the campus at risk of closure.

1. Increased Student Enrollment

For the 2024–2025 school year, the school added more than 45 new students. In fact, demand grew so much that two new classrooms have been added for the 2025–2026 school year!

2. A More Engaged, Connected Community

As enrollment rebounded, so too did family engagement. Dr. Lawson knew that increased enrollment couldn’t happen without stronger relationships with families. And the school’s efforts have paid off.

“We have really made sure we are communicating with them,” she says. “They love to be consulted with.”

Before the changes, community meetings and events often saw just 15 to 20 families in attendance. Now those numbers have quadrupled.

“We had almost 80 families show up,” Dr. Lawson shares. “And that’s just those we took attendance of — people kept trickling in.” Events like NAAPID Day, which once had low attendance, are now widely attended, reinforcing the school’s renewed sense of connection with its families.

Watch the Full Story On-Demand

The transformation of Highwood Hills was part of the district’s larger enrollment turnaround, which helped SPPS reverse a decade-long enrollment decline and grow enrollment by 527 students for the 2024–2025 school year. Read the district case study here.

The story of Highwood Hills is proof that even a school on the brink of closure can turn its future around with the right leadership, strategy, and family engagement.

Watch the on-demand webinar to hear Dr. Lawson’s strategy for increasing enrollment at Highwood Hills and to learn how your school can do the same.