Enrollment is declining in schools across Virginia. And projections show that it will continue to drop in the next few years.
When the folks at the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service were looking at public school enrollment last year, they expected it to decline by about 10,000 students. It ended up declining by 15,000 students. Here's research analyst Zach Jackson.
"That is the second largest, single year decline in enrollment over the past few decades,” says research analyst Zach Jackson.
He says declining enrollment is driven declining birth rates.
"The number of children born annually in Virginia has mostly fallen since births began to noticeably decline in 2008," Jackson says. "That means that smaller kindergarten classes have entered the school divisions, and those smaller classes have made up more and more of the K-12 system, pushing enrollment downwards."
By 2030, the Weldon Cooper Center projects enrollment is anticipated to decline by about 40,000 students.
"Virginia saw nearly three decades of uninterrupted growth before the pandemic. That's obviously changed, and now we’re looking at a period of decline," Jackson says. "It's very new, this decline in the grand scheme of things. But over this five year period, we see enrollment settling back to levels that we saw in the 2000s."
That's not a sudden freefall, he says, but a steady retreat; one that will require school divisions make adjustments rather than a complete overhaul.
