Before you continue with this article from The Epoch Times, I recommend reading an earlier article about the “Homeschooling Revolution” from WND News Center which adds some context. Leftist degeneracy is polluting public schools in every state, but cesspools like California and Illinois are the worst off. You know it’s bad when even Californians are sick of how degenerate their schools are and are fleeing to home schools and private schools in droves.
(The Epoch Times)—In light of steadily declining enrollment in the Broward County Public School System, district officials are preparing for the probability of closing some of its facilities.
In an initiative called “Redefining Our Schools,” Broward County Public Schools (BCPS) officials are developing possible strategies to address the district’s chronic decline in enrollment at their traditional public schools.
“Over the years, some schools have experienced significant enrollment changes, as families have moved to different areas or selected other school options,” the BCPS website states. “The District is exploring ways to reduce the number of under-enrolled schools to ensure equitable funding and instructional resources across the District.”
To involve the community in the planning process, the district has held a series of town hall meetings. The first meeting was held at Fort Lauderdale High on Feb. 8. The second was at J.P. Taravella High in Coral Springs on Feb. 15, and the third was held at Charles W. Flanagan High in Pembroke Pines on Feb. 22.
At the Feb. 22 town hall meeting, BCPS Superintendent Peter Licata informed attendees that enrollment in the district had fallen from 259,130 students in the 2004-2005 school year to 201,273 in the 2023-2024 school year.
While district officials have yet to release a preliminary list of schools under consideration for combination, repurposing, rezoning, or closure, he said the district did release a list of the 67 schools that are the most under-enrolled schools, operating at 70 percent or less of their full capacity.
With an enrollment loss of approximately 24,000 students, Broward is seeing an annual loss of $207 million to the district.
Further enrollment decline is expected.
Across the district, it’s estimated that there are 50,000 empty seats, as 68 of the district’s 332 schools are under-enrolled. Of those, 46 are elementary schools, 17 are middle schools, and five are high schools.
“This process probably should have started about 10 years ago,” Mr. Licata confessed at the Feb. 22 town hall meeting, adding, “We have some time to catch up, but we got to do it quickly.”
Methods proposed to address the decline in enrollment are to combine schools by merging the under-enrolled facilities into one school. One possibility is combining two of the under-enrolled elementary schools to create K-8 or 6-12 schools.
Another proposal is to repurpose some under-enrolled locations by turning all or part of a facility into a space to provide community services. Another consideration is selling or leasing properties to address community needs, such as affordable housing.
Closures are also possible, in which case students will be reassigned to another school.
Also considered is the idea of reconfiguring attendance zones.
‘Many Choices’
According to statistics presented in the 2024-2025 BCPS Budget Workshop on Jan. 30, attendance at Broward’s traditional public schools fell from 221,000 students during the 2014-2015 school year to 197,000 in the 2023-2024 school year, a decline of more than 20,000 students. In the meantime, enrollment in charter schools has grown, rising from 41,000 to 50,000 during that same decade.
The largest increase is the number of Broward students taking advantage of Florida’s Family Empowerment Scholarship—used to pay for private schools or homeschool programs—increasing to 26,000 in the 2023-2024 school year from just 3,000 during the 2014-2015 school year, more than eight times what it was 10 years ago.
Virtual learning programs are another option.
According to Public School Review, Broward’s virtual instruction program currently serves 403 students. While the number may seem small, it is a 444 percent increase from five years ago.
Homeschooling is another choice. Data compiled by Brighterly shows that Florida ranked second in the nation (22.5 percent) for the number of home-school students in 2023. Data provided by the Florida DOE showed 10,412 (around 6.8 percent) of Broward’s students were being home-schooled during the 2021-2022 school year. For the 2022-2023 school year, that number fell to 6,182. However, with the decline in enrollments and fewer students in the BCPS system, the percentage of homeschooled students dipped only slightly to 6.36 percent.
Charter schools are also drawing students away from traditional public schools in Broward.
Data from the Florida Department of Education shows that charter school enrollment has increased steadily over the past decade.
During the 2013-2014 school year, 229,428 students were enrolled in charter schools.
For the 2022-2023 school year, charter school enrollment hit 382,367 students.
More charter schools were created to accommodate the increased enrollment, growing from 658 in 2019 to 726 in 2023.
“We must acknowledge that our community’s educational needs and expectations have changed over the years and will continue to change,” Mr. Licata said at the Feb. 22 town hall. “BCPS is no longer the only option. Parents and students have many choices.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
