Forecast: Enrollment slide will continue at Mesa Public Schools

Yahoo

17-02-2025

Feb. 17—Bad news for Mesa Public Schools: student enrollment, which drives the budget, is likely to drop for another 10 years or more, according to a consultant.
A low-birth rate and school choice continue to play into the ongoing student decline despite Arizona almost doubling its population between 1990 and 2020 to 7.3 million.
"We're going to have 10 million people in 2050," said demographer Rick Brammer of Applied Economics at the Feb. 11 Governing Board study session.
"But the way it is right now, we're dealing in a world where even though you see growth ... The number of students out there to serve in the state of Arizona is not growing at all. It's fixed."
Brammer blamed it on birth rates.
"Back at about 2006, 2007, the Great Recession, immigration legislation, all kinds of things and the birth rate basically crashed by 18%," he said, adding it was at that time the lowest birth rate in Arizona history.
He said the birth rate then stabilized for three years and he and other demographers anticipated it would go back up again but the exact opposite happened.
"People were so traumatized by what they saw happen in the Great Recession," Brammer said. "They acquired so much debt, they saw their parents suffer to such a degree that essentially what they all decided to do was either not have kids at all or put off the decision for later in life.
"So, we saw the average age of first birth increased by five years in a space of 10 years. One of the things we know about that is that the longer you wait to have your first child, the fewer children you will have."
According to Brammer, 102,000 babies were born in Arizona in 2006 versus 78,000 births in 2023 even with the overall population growing.
And while the households of adults in their child-bearing years, those 25-44, has increased from 2010-20 in the district's boundary, they are mainly renters who live in multifamily units not intended for families, according to Applied Economics.
Unlike total population, those under the age of 18 declined in most parts of the district, it said.
The other compounding factor is school choice.
"Since 2009, charter school enrollment has increased by 118,000 students, while other public school enrollment has decreased by 91,000 students," Brammer said. "Except for a little bit of growth between 2009 and about 2014 total publicly funded enrollment in the state of Arizona has not changed at all.
"And so as we've introduced choice, it's taken the same size pie and cutting into more pieces. Our pain is inflicted by demographics piled on the timing of choice. That's where the real pain is."
The state's Empowerment Scholarship Account program, or ESA, in 2022 was expanded to include all K-12 students eligible for vouchers.
Since then the number of new students receiving vouchers to attend private schools went from 11,200 two years prior to 79,000 this year statewide, Brammer said.
"Most of the people who took them early were already in a private school," he said.
According to Applied Economics, the share of students previously attending a public school before receiving an ESA increased from 21% in Fiscal Year 2023 to 57% in Fiscal Year 2025. That translated to about 29,000 students leaving public schools since the program expansion.
Although the program continued to grow last school year, it was not as fast as the last two years, Brammer pointed out.
He assured the board that MPS, which has been losing students over the past 14 years, was not alone as most districts in established areas also have been impacted by lower birth rates and increasing enrollment choices.
He added that the district like Chandler Unified, Tempe Union K-12 and Scottsdale Unified haven't fully recovered their enrollment prior to the pandemic.
"These districts, I would say, are in middle- to upper-income areas for the most part," he said. "You see this drop in 2020. You got a little back but very little compared to what was lost. But so did every one of these other districts, they didn't come back.
"If you look at lower socioeconomic status areas in the Valley, you'll see that a lot of kids came back. And what we know about choice is that it's not free to anybody. You have to know about it.
"You have to have the money to do it and you have to have the time to do it. So this impact of choice isn't even across the Valley either."
Mesa is also losing students to other public school districts. Gilbert Public Schools took the biggest chunk at 2,122 students, followed by Chandler Unified with 728 and Tempe Elementary School District, 710.
But in those districts, Brammer has pointed out to their governing boards, high single-family home costs have "locked out" young families that are the most likely to have school-age children.
According to Applied Economics, a total of 117 charter schools and public school districts are serving over 18,200 students living within MPS' boundary — or about 23% of its school-age population.
Charter schools enrolled 13,000 Mesa kids at 100 different facilities while 17 school districts enrolled about 5,200.
Brammer and Associate Superintendent Matt Strom noted that household proximity to a school plays a big part in where parents enroll their children.
"There's misconceptions on who your competitors are and proximity matters," Strom said.
For instance, Mesa High School's main competitor is not Mountain View but Gilbert High for students and Dobson High's main competition is not Westwood but Chandler High, Strom said.
And like other districts, MPS' K-2 class size has declined the most, which is "not showing us a lot of hope for the future," Brammer said.
He warned that while the 9-12 enrollment is now by far the biggest cohort, it's starting to arc down.
"We know in the next five or six years, we're going to see a pretty big drop at the high-school level," he said.
Brammer said that Arizona is growing but that the 18 and younger population has been unchanged for the last 15 years and "probably will continue to be for at least the next 10."
Board member Marcie Hutchinson said it appeared that the state's passage of SB 1070 in 2010 also was a major factor behind the district's enrollment drop and asked how many students were lost because of it.
About 8,000, Brammer responded.
Much of the provisions of the anti-immigration law was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2014.
Hutchinson also asked how the Trump administration's push to deport people who are in the country illegally will impact enrollment.
Strom said that staff uses a model to predict enrollment loss and for next school year the district anticipates losing 1,800 students.
"There are several factors in that," Strom said. "One of those is immigration. This is not a political statement, I don't want people to hear it as a political statement. This is an impact on enrollment and enrollment affects our budget."
He said that district administration discusses a lot if "that 1,800 number enough and do we need to figure out where are our next budgetary savings will come from if 1,800 rolls in at 2,500 due to immigration."
Hutchinson referred to Superintendent Andi Fourlis' status report to the board, which mentioned that the district's "attendance numbers have gotten to now 89%."
"I know that some of that is the result of fear and I worry about the impact this is going to have," Hutchinson said.
She also asked how many MPS students came from other districts, which Brammer said he is able to track but didn't have the number off the top of his head.
He also said that the new federal policy on immigration won't have a big impact on MPS' enrollment.
"It's not going to be 8,000 because we just do not have the type of illegal population that we have now," Brammer said. "It's much less families and it's much more single adults.
"I don't believe that there is the volume of people with kids to be deported that would have that kind of an impact. Will it have some impact? Yeah. I'm more worried about the fear than I am the actual event. It's keeping people home from work, too, by the way."
Board member Sharon Benson wanted to know why students leave district campuses and said if MPS was able to recapture 2,000 of them it would not need to do layoffs.
"I'm just going to keep beating this drum until we actually answer the question," Benson said. "What's the district doing to recapture because parents are choosing something else because we are not providing them with the product they want for their children."
Brammer said that the choice of education is socially motivated — "borderline segregation — people choosing to want to go to school with people who look like them."
Benson asked what evidence he based his statement on.
"Well, the fact that the charter schools tend to have a much higher ratio of children of certain ethnicities than others," he responded.
After Benson pressed him into agreeing it was more an economic issue behind the choice of schooling, she added that she didn't want it misconstrued that it was a race issue.
"Let's not bring race into it because that is totally counterproductive to anything that we want to discuss here," she said. "We need to realize as a district parents are choosing to leave for reasons that we can probably address and that we can mitigate the things that they don't like."
She asked if the district conducts an exit survey with families who leave the district. Staff said the district just started such a survey,
Board member Rachel Walden admonished Brammer, saying "I don't appreciate that we paid a consulting fee for somebody to come in and tell us that charter school parents are racist."
He apologized and said he didn't mean to imply that.
"That's the impression I got," Walden said. "It sounded very bad, because we don't have the data on that. It could just be that charter schools are going into specific neighborhoods to build schools, and I think proximity to one's home is also a big factor in where people go."
"And now we're seeing a lot of developments where there's a new housing development that goes up and then a charter school goes right up next to that new housing development. And so there's those trends, too."
She said she was interested in finding out where students who left the district went to.
After schools re-opened following COVID, the kids disappeared, Walden said.
"The birth rate didn't change," she pointed out. "In just four years, we lost students and I think that's nationwide.
"The big fervor over school boards happened when parents saw some of the stuff that was being taught in the classroom, or some of the stuff that teachers said," Walden continued.
"So there is a place where I think parents have left public school. Maybe they didn't even see it in their own school but they saw what was going on in other schools that made them nervous.
"So there's definitely a lot of factors that are not just birth rates. The birth rates kind of got us here with our low enrollment K through second grade. Younger kids, they're not coming in and that's going to compound as we go forward.
"I think there's a trust that we need to build with the community."