Chelsea Coffin: Future enrollment growth depends on DC’s public middle and high schools gaining confidence of millennial families
There is every reason to expect DC’s public school enrollment to increase in the coming years. In DC, the childbirth count is up by 1,000 per year compared to 10 years ago. More families are staying in the city and choosing public schools for their children, especially in early grades. If these trends continue, we estimate in our new D.C. Policy Center study — “Will Children of Current Millennials Become Future Public School Students?: How D.C.’s Young Families May Shape Public School Enrollment” — that there could be 104,591 students in DC’s traditional public and public charter schools by the 2026-27 school year, an increase of 21,100 students over the figure in 2016-17, when pre-kindergarten-to-grade-12 enrollment was 83,491.
Where would this growth occur? Enrollment patterns suggest that at least half of the growth would be in the city’s middle and high school grades, which actually lost 1,700 students over the previous 10 years. Population forecasts and housing prices indicate that the population growth will likely occur outside of the boundaries for Wilson High School and its feeders — which is the only part of the city where families strongly prefer in-boundary schools, as we showed in a report this spring. Enrollment growth depends on millennials staying in the city and choosing traditional public and public charter schools for their kids. But given their incomes and housing prices in DC, most will live in parts of the city where the majority of students do not currently attend their in-boundary school.
Importantly, the city can meet the enrollment growth only if its public schools can attract students in ways we have not experienced before at the middle and high school levels. We can quantify this “attractiveness” factor by comparing enrollment at a certain grade level to the number of children born in DC for that cohort, meaning the number of births in the relevant year for the age group in that grade.
At present, a high proportion of DC children do not stay in DC public education though middle and high school. For example, in 2017-18, the number of students enrolled in grade eight was only 56 percent of the number of babies born 13 years ago. For the public schools to add 21,100 students by 2026-27, this share will need to increase to 68 percent. And in grade 12, 54 percent of children born 17 years earlier will need to stay, compared to 47 percent today. Furthermore, these increases in cohort participation will have to come outside of the boundaries for Wilson High School and its feeders. Middle and high schools outside the Wilson boundaries already account for 85 percent of the growth in later grades in recent years, but the growth has been uneven, as some middle and high schools have long wait lists while others have empty seats.
What does this mean for future planning? The DC government is now developing a Master Facilities Plan to determine the resources necessary to meet growing enrollments, and how best to deploy these resources. There was space for about 14,800 additional students in pre-kindergarten-to-grade-12 schools based on capacity in 2016-17. While some of these seats are at schools that are growing and likely are able to draw new families, others are in schools that have remained empty for many years.
Our study shows that making these empty seats attractive to parents is as important as creating new seats for continued growth. Just as specialized programs — especially dual language — have boosted enrollment at the elementary level, a diverse array of innovative and strong middle and high schools will be necessary to encourage enrollment in these levels through the next stage of DC’s public-school growth.
Chelsea Coffin is director of the Education Policy Initiative at the D.C. Policy Center.
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