An alternative school that educates some of D.C.’s most challenged students will close at the end of the school year, school officials announced Thursday.

D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Lewis Ferebee said the school system will begin working with students at Washington Metropolitan High School individually to place them at different campuses next school year. Ferebee first proposed closing Washington Metropolitan in a letter to families in late November, citing low enrollment, dismal attendance and lagging achievement.

School officials said Washington Metropolitan students do not perform as well as their peers in the city’s other alternative schools, which are designed to educate students who have fallen behind or faced other challenges at traditional campuses.“We just could not allow those students to have another year at a place that had those types of outcomes,” Ferebee said in an interview. “You don’t see that type of attendance rate, those types of outcomes in most of our schools across the District.”

The school has an attendance rate of about 40 percent, school system officials said. Just 10 percent of students at the school are meeting expectations on state assessments in English, and none of the school’s students are meeting expectations in math.

The Ward 1 school, which educates 157 students, will shutter despite the protests of some students, teachers, and some D.C. education officials who urged Ferebee to delay the closing or reconsider.

Critics argued the school system did not give the Washington Metropolitan community enough time to prepare for a closure, and said the school system never gave the campus the resources it needed to flourish.

More than 1,600 people signed a petition circulated by the Washington Teachers’ Union asking the chancellor to keep the school open for at least another year.

“Washington Met is not just a building, it is a community of caring adults who serve our most vulnerable students,” the petition read. “By shutting the door on this community, we deny our children the support and relationships they deserve.”

Students delivered the petition to D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and D.C. Council members last week. They pleaded their case in public hearings and in front of the D.C. State Board of Education, which decided last week to send a letter asking Ferebee to postpone the closure.

Bowser has approved the closure, according to Ferebee.

Lyric Johnson, a 16-year-old who led the students’ advocacy, said she feels the school was set up to fail. There are no shelves in the school’s library, she said, and books spill out of large cardboard boxes.

She said she arrived at Washington Metropolitan to repeat her 8th grade year. She feels the small campus is an asset—teachers have more time to give her individual attention and she feels comfortable asking for help.

The teenagers had delivered meals to people living in a homeless encampment under a D.C. overpass. The students drew connections to their own feelings of displacement after the city decided to clear some of those encampments.

Johnson is scheduled to graduate at the end of the school year but she said she feels it’s important to continue advocating for younger students.

“My mom is supportive but some people don’t have the luxury of getting that,” she said. “It’s still somebody that needs a Washington Met, that needs a home, that needs the love that they don’t get at home.”

Another student, Angel Johnson, said she arrived at Washington Metropolitan with zero credits. She had stopped attending classes at Dunbar High School to attend a job training program, she said.

The 19-year-old did not complete the job training program and chose to attend Washington Metropolitan instead. At Dunbar, Angel Johnson said she felt distracted by other students and often felt lost in large classes.

At Washington Metropolitan, Angel Johnson said teachers and other school workers have pushed her to graduate. They contact her if she misses a day of school.

“If I needed help, I asked for it and they were there,” she said.

This story originally appeared on WAMU.