Enrollment in DPS is dropping. Here's why.
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Illustration: Allie Carl/Axios
While Denver Public Schools has anticipated a dip in enrollment the past few years, its latest projections signal a worsening problem.
Why it matters: Declining enrollment leads to school closures and reduced funding for schools, meaning fewer resources for children.
The latest: A district enrollment report released in June projects DPS will lose 6,338 students by 2028.
- That 8.3% drop includes 3,625 fewer elementary age students and 2,025 fewer high school students living in the city.
State of play: Declining birth rates are the main contributor to lower enrollment, DPS enrollment and campus planning executive director Andrew Huber tells us.
- Huber expects the low birth rates in Denver to continue over the next four years.
Context: A mini-baby boom during the pandemic has ended, plunging the U.S. fertility rate to its lowest point in nearly 100 years, Axios' Ivana Saric writes.
- Meanwhile, many Americans between ages 18 and 49 simply don't want to have children.
Another factor highlighted by the DPS report is a lack of single-family housing being built in Denver, Huber tells us,, which is far more likely to yield more school-aged children than the multi-unit housing currently under construction in Denver.
The intrigue: DPS, which has a school choice option, gained 88 students from surrounding districts last year.
- While the number seems minute, it marked the highest number of out-of-district students in the past five years. "We don't believe that the driver [of declining enrollment] is kids opting out of the system," Huber says.
Zoom out: Some parents reconsidered how their kids were educated during the pandemic, leading to a rise in alternative schooling more broadly across the country, School and State Finance Project executive director Patrick Gibson tells us.
- Gibson, who leads the Connecticut-based policy organization, says some parents pulled their kids from public schools and placed them in charter or private schools, or choose homeschooling, though he didn't say this was necessarily impacting Denver.
The big picture: The number of students in Colorado's 178 school districts dropped to its lowest point in a decade, the Colorado Sun reports, with 1,800 fewer students last fall than in 2022.
- Dips in enrollment are part of a larger national trend, Colorado Education Commissioner Susana Córdova, the former DPS superintendent, said in a January release announcing the state figures.
What's next: While there's little the district can do about birth rates, Huber says DPS wants to improve the education provided to students.
- DPS recently passed new rules about when schools are consolidated and closed, a step that Huber says will provide a better roadmap for giving students an optimal education no matter the school size.