The Broward County School Board is set to hold a meeting on Wednesday morning as they ponder whether to close up to five schools across the district due to low enrollment. The meeting comes months after school board members held town hall meetings and district workshops to consider various opinions before making their ultimate decision. The county’s school superintendent, Dr. Howard Hepburn, will present a plan that recommends several changes to some schools and a closure of another. “We know there’s going to be some hard decisions that have to be made,” Hepburn said in a December interview. According to his plan, three elementary schools, Coconut Creek Elementary, Hollywood Central Elementary, and Coral Cove Elementary in Miramar, will be converted into K-8 centers while Broward Estates Elementary in Lauderhill, the district’s lowest-enrolled and performing school, will close. His recommendations would impact the 2025-26 school year. “Dr. Hepburn has come back with this plan in phase one and then based on board action tomorrow, we’ll see what happens,” said Broward School Board Member Lori Alhadeff. “It will save millions of dollars and then we can reallocate those resources to other things, to put back into educating our students. Officials have said for months that the school district is under-enrolled and that they are spending millions of dollars on 45,000 empty seats, which is equivalent to about 50 schools. The district said school closures are necessary to recoup that lost money. “The law of economics in education and in public resourcing is that we have 40 to 60 more schools than we can afford,” said Broward School Board Member Allen Zeman The school board will vote on the superintendent’s plan on Wednesday.