The Clark County School District’s plunging enrollment is a trend with no end in sight.
Projections show that school funding could drop by nearly a quarter-billion dollars by 2030 as fewer students enroll to fill district classrooms.
Rick Baldwin, the district director of comprehensive planning, said the school system is expected to lose about 25,000 more students over the next five years. A drop that steep would bring enrollment to levels last seen in the 2003-04 school year.
Enrollment-based funding helped propel CCSD to become the fifth largest school district in the country. But the district has lost tens of thousands of students in recent years, leading to multimillion-dollar budget reductions and talk of closing campuses.
DISTRICT IN DECLINE
Budget shortfalls can mean smaller staffs, limits on instructional material purchases and even a hold on plans to upgrade school buildings, said Megan Griffard, assistant professor of educational policy and leadership at UNLV.
“Because funding is tied to student enrollment, there’s pretty much nothing in schools that isn’t affected by a decline in enrollment,” Griffard said.
Most of the school district’s $3.9 billion general fund comes from Nevada’s Pupil-Centered Funding Plan, which allocates money based on how many students are enrolled at a school district in any given year.
The state funded CCSD at an adjusted base rate of $9,501 per student this school year and granted additional funds to support English learners, students identified as being at risk of not graduating, and gifted and talented students.
This model allows the school district’s budget to fluctuate with enrollment. But there are nearly 44,000 fewer students in the district than when enrollment peaked in the 2018-19 school year, state data shows.
Employees feel the squeeze
State funding will rise to an adjusted base rate of $9,572 per pupil starting next school year. If the per-pupil rate doesn’t change and enrollment loss projections hold true, student population declines could cause the school district to have upward of $239 million less in funding by the 2030-31 school year.
Schools and district employees are already starting to feel the squeeze of the sustained enrollment decline.
Because funding is tied to student enrollment, there’s pretty much nothing in schools that isn’t affected by a decline in enrollment.
District officials pointed to shrinking enrollment as one reason schools will have about $50 million less in funding for next school year, a loss of funds that could put hundreds of district employees out of a job come August.
Officials want positions secured by the start of next school year for the more than 200 teachers whose jobs are currently in jeopardy, Superintendent Jhone Ebert said in April.
Declining enrollment also presents new challenges for maintaining the district’s aging school buildings, according to Brandon McLaughlin, the school district’s chief of facilities.
Funding to rapidly construct new schools was abundant as enrollment rose, he said, but money to keep the buildings up and running has dwindled. The average age of a school district building is 29 years old.
“We built and built and built throughout the ’90s, and we had more pupil’s funding coming in to maintain those facilities,” McLaughlin said, “but then when you get on the inverse of that, you built all these buildings, and then now you don’t have the resources to maintain them how you want to or how you should be, and that’s the conundrum we’re getting into.”
A report detailing ideas to best optimize the district’s school buildings lists campus closures as a potential solution for certain under-enrolled schools.
School districts in Nevada and across the country are scrambling to adapt to a new era of shrinking student populations.
We built and built and built throughout the ’90s, and we had more pupil’s funding coming in to maintain those facilities, but then when you get on the inverse of that, you built all these buildings, and then now you don’t have the resources to maintain them how you want to or how you should be, and that’s the conundrum we’re getting into.
Of Nevada’s 17 school districts, 16 reported having declining enrollment, with Nye County being the sole exception, according to a presentation to the Joint Interim Standing Committee on Education in March.
Carson City School District Superintendent Andrew Feuling told lawmakers that student enrollment at all state schools, including charter schools, is down about 25,000 students compared with six years ago.
Nationally, all 10 of the nation’s largest school districts have reported lowered enrollment this school year, with many having seen enrollment fall for multiple years in a row.
“This enrollment decline … it’s not cyclical. It’s not something that we’re just expecting, like the business cycle, to go up and down,” Feuling told the committee. “There are structural changes happening in our society that very much are impacting all of this.”
Contact Spencer Levering at slevering@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0253.
