 6/9/18 – Bayamón, Puerto Rico – Jayson Grau is a student in the second grade at Aurelio Perez Martinez, one of the schools set to close before the Fall. His grandmother Wanda takes the kids to school while their mother works, and lives at an apartment nearby to theirs so that she can help take care of the whole family.

The Puerto Rican Department of Education is closing 283 schools, and moving multiple schools into the same building, citing the past year’s drastic drop in enrollment as one of the primary reasons to lower the amount of schools, and instead increase the amount of students in each school. Students of special education schools are one of the groups to be most negatively affected by these closings, as the new schools may not offer the resources the students need and have access to at their current schools. 

(Sofie Hecht Photography) 