According to the official fall update, City Schools of Decatur’s K-12 enrollment is 5,643, 55 students fewer than fall, 2019. After a decade of explosive growth enrollment began leveling off in 2017, but this is the first school year since the early 2000s where overall enrollment is actually lower than the previous year.
Heidi Whatley, CSD’s research and analytics director couldn’t immediately identify the last time this happened, but she estimates it was around 2004.
Part of the decline is unquestionably COVID-19 related. Another reason could be that live birth counts—that is, babies born with their parents living in the school district—have dropped steadily from 302 in 2012-13 to 181 in 2018-19 (the most recent year for birth counts).
Historically birth rates haven’t accurately reflected enrollment increase since many families move into Decatur after their children are born. Though it’s way too early to tell, that might begin changing over the next decade.
“It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out,” Whatley said. “Typically, we get a pretty big [enrollment] boost at grades K, 1, 6 and 9, and we didn’t get those boosts this year, probably because of the pandemic. A lot of people stayed put, particularly those with little ones, since kindergarten isn’t required.”
From the 2010-11 school year through 2019-20, K-12 enrollment increased by 2,387 or approximately 73 percent, reaching an all-time high of 5698 last year. The peak years for growth were 2012 to 2016 when enrollment increased every year by more than 300 students, with a high of 379 more students in 2016 over 2015.
But that began dropping with 277 more students in 2017 over 2016, 223 more in ’18 and 155 more in 2019 before this year’s minus 55.
Enrollment is lower than last year in each of Decatur’s nine K-12 schools save for Decatur High which has an all-time high of 1,688, or 128 more than a year ago.
Each of Decatur’s K-12 classes have more than 400 students except for the senior class (357) and kindergarten class (373—the district was projecting 450 kindergarteners for this year).
During the public comment portion of the last three school board meetings (October, November and December), increasingly more parents have angrily threatened to take their kids out of the district and send them to private schools or other public districts. Whatley says that to date the numbers show that isn’t happening.
At the close of the first semester on Dec. 18, CSD has seen 47 students leave for home schooling while 57 have left for private schools. In 2019-20 those numbers were 46 and 113 respectively for the entire year (not just one semester) and 27 and 89 for the whole year in 2018-19.
“Those numbers aren’t crazy different,” Whatley said, “and even our [overall enrollment] just saw a slight drop. A lot of districts are seeing huge drops, and in some districts very few kids showed up for kindergarten. So for now we’re maintaining pretty decent numbers.”
About the Author
