People Forgot to Have Babies, So Now Schools Are Closing Down

Readers of a certain age may recall when school overcrowding was a big worry. Throughout the 1990s, as the baby boomers became school parents — that is, as the millennials started flooding elementary schools across the country — students were moved into temporary classrooms erected on the playing field, and PTAs everywhere fretted about overpopulation on the local level.

These days, much of America — rural, suburban, and urban — has the opposite problem: Local schools don’t have enough students to maintain basic operations, so districts are consolidating, robbing neighborhoods of their hubs and forcing children into long bus rides.

“At Fitzmorris Elementary, one first grade class had just five students,” reported the K-12 news source the 74 Million, which zoomed in on one large school district in Colorado. “Small schools lacked their own music and physical education teachers. And afterschool providers canceled programs because only a handful of students signed up.”

Why is this happening? Part of the problem is, of course, the boomers. Retirement-age empty-nesters are turning nice towns from vibrant towns into antique towns.

Fitzmorris is in Jefferson County, Colorado, whose median age has climbed from 36.8 in 2000 to over 40. Household size is slightly shrinking in the county.

You’ll find these antique towns everywhere, especially in New England. The boomers are staying put, and new houses are not allowed, so the towns are aging in place while the school hallways go quiet.

The name of that education news site points toward another cause. Former CNN anchor Campbell Brown launched the education website “The 74 Million” in 2015 and named it after the number of children under 18 in the United States. When the 2020 census came out, we had 73 million minors. Since then, the number of children has only slid lower.

The birthrate started falling during the Great Recession in 2008, and it has kept falling. The baby bust is now highschool age, so high schools are facing the consolidation crunch that earlier swept elementary and middle schools.

“Most school systems across Virginia will see their enrollments decline over the next five years,” reported Cardinal News, a Virginia news source. The article quoted demographer Hamilton Lombard:

“Currently, there are nearly as many Virginians turning 65 as 18. Virginia’s population under age 10 is 15% smaller than those in their 20s which will likely add pressure to both college and the labor force in the future.”

A huge portion of the public will experience local school closures in the coming decades (unless AI gym teachers become a thing). It’s quite the reversal from the 1990s.

Classrooms, to be sure, are often overcrowded today thanks to teacher shortages. But the fear of swelling enrollments busting the seams of a school building is, in most of America, a thing of the past. In fact, your local school may soon be a thing of the past.