The fate of closed schools: Documenting the relationships between school property reuses and their beneficiaries in Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Public schools play a pivotal role in successful community development. Yet, with school closures on the rise across North America, there is limited knowledge on the outcomes of closed school properties. This study documents the afterlife of closed school properties in Ontario, Canada, identifying their potential beneficiaries, and assessing the prevalence of property vacancies. Using a dataset of over 400 schools closed between 2011 and 2021, we determined that the prevalence of certain school property reuses varied by degree of urbanicity. Fewer than one-fifth of reused properties were designed to benefit highly deprived populations, despite over half of the school closures occurring in neighborhoods with higher levels of deprivation. Furthermore, one-third of school properties remained vacant at the time of study, 36% of which closed over a decade ago. The findings reflect the need for additional consideration of the future uses of school properties prior to their closures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".