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.
The remains of a rabbit’s legs spoil beneath a pile of textbooks at Escuela Jose de Diego in Vega Baja. Where students once read children’s books about animals, textbooks now serve as the final resting place of the island's living creatures.












