Inside Escuela Intermedia Marcelino Canino Canino in Dorado, which closed in 2018, the sign “Bienvenidos”, or “Welcome”, is still displayed in a former technology classroom. Stepping into an abandoned school can feel like entering another time. Desks rot in permanent rows. Ants creep along the spines of old textbooks. White chalk, scrawled on blackboards and never erased, marks the last day of school. More than half of Puerto Rico’s public schools have closed their doors in the last 10 years. Government officials justified the “consolidations,” saying hurricane damage and declining student enrollment necessitated them. In the years since, some schools have found new life as community centers, while others have been leased or sold. The majority of buildings, however, decompose like rotting corpses, their bones swaddled in nature’s eerie embrace, remnants of past lives slowly disintegrating into earth.corpses, their bones swaddled in nature’s eerie embrace, remnants of past lives slowly disintegrating into earth.