The Detroit public school district is blocking parents and children from buying a building the district doesn’t even own.

Detroit Prep, a charter school, wants to move out of a church basement and into the former Anna Joyce Elementary building. Detroit’s public school district no longer owns the building. It sold the facility to a private landlord in 2014.

But the school district – now called the Detroit Public Community Schools District (DPCSD) – is trying to block the sale anyway.

Detroit joins Tucson and Milwaukee as cities where traditional school administrators and school boards have stopped or slowed private school and public charter school efforts to repurpose vacant school buildings. Since 2010, the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) has closed some 20 district schools due to declining enrollment. Today, it sits on all or part of at least a half-dozen of these buildings.

The school board’s website says it’s holding some of these buildings “for future growth,” even though local media report that the district has 13,000 empty seats in the schools still in use. Meanwhile, classrooms are empty and, as in Detroit, easy prey for vandals.

Read the full article by Jonathan Butcher about vacant schools from The Heritage Foundation