MEDFORD — Every single school in Medford will be closed this Friday. Not for a snow day. Not for a pipe burst. Because the district does not have enough adults to staff a single building.

Superintendent Suzanne B. Galusi broke the news to families Tuesday in a letter that read less like an announcement and more like a white flag: "There will not be enough staff in any school building to safely and effectively support teaching, learning, and building operations for students."

Not most buildings. Not a few schools on the margins. Any building. In the entire city.

All classes and after-school activities are canceled. District offices will remain open — though it's unclear what they'll be administering. The closure tacks a day onto the end of the school year, pushing it to June 25.

Friday is Good Friday, and it falls within Passover. Unlike many Massachusetts districts, Medford does not give students or staff the day off — it was a scheduled school day. But the district has been monitoring attendance on religious holidays and working with its union — a sign this has been building for a while. It's just the first time the gap was too wide to cover with substitutes.

Galusi promised the district would be "further reviewing our current policies and procedures relating to the school calendar and the use of religious holidays."

Translation: this wasn't a surprise. They saw it coming, tried to manage it, and ran out of bodies anyway.

Medford isn't an outlier. It's a preview.

Massachusetts school districts are running on fumes — rising fixed costs, thinning staff, and budgets that haven't kept pace with a single year of inflation, let alone a decade of it.

Medford didn't close its schools because too many teachers called out for Good Friday. It closed its schools because one religious holiday was enough to break a system that was already broken.