Headcounts, and budgets, down at U.S. public schools
A school system in suburban Kansas City is eliminating over 100 jobs, including kindergarten aides and library clerks. Oakland, California, is closing seven schools. Other districts around the country are merging classrooms, selling buildings and leaving teaching positions unfilled in order to close budget gaps.
Public school systems are beginning to feel the pinch from enrollment losses tied to the coronavirus pandemic.
Money for schools is driven partly by student headcounts, and emergency provisions in many states allowed schools to maintain funding at pre-pandemic levels. But like the billions of dollars of federal relief money that have helped schools weather the crisis, those measures were not meant to last forever.
In Olathe, Kansas, where the school system is cutting 140 jobs, Deputy Superintendent John Hutchison said the extra federal money merely put off the inevitable.
Now it is trimming millions of dollars from its budgets because enrollment, having peaked at more than 30,000 students in fall 2019, fell by around 900 in the first full school year of the pandemic. Less than 100 of those students have returned.
“Where did those kids go?” Hutchison asked during a recent public meeting. “Where are they? They didn’t come back this year. That’s what’s laying on that additional reduction in our funding.”
Families opting for homeschooling, private schools and other options sent enrollment down sharply in the first full school year of the pandemic, and generally it has been slow to recover.
In Houston, the largest district in Texas, enrollment tumbled by more than 22,000 to around 183,000 in fall 2021 and only about half of those students have returned. The district was shielded from making cuts in the first two years of the pandemic by what are known as “hold harmless” provisions, but those protections are expected to end. Superintendent Millard House has asked departments to cut $60 million from next year’s budget.
Among other states that took steps to protect school budgets, Delaware provided $9.3 million in one-time funding in the fiscal year that ended in summer 2021 to school districts and charter schools to prevent layoffs over enrollment declines, and North Carolina lawmakers decided to allow schools to use pre-pandemic attendance levels.
More districts will be making cuts in coming years, said Alex Spurrier, an associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a think tank. The last of the federal aid must be spent by 2024.
“Once the federal funding dries up, it will put a lot more districts in a lot more difficult position if they’re kind of kicking the can down the road of making the adjustments that they’ll need if they are going to be serving smaller student populations in the years to come,” he said.
Some districts have struggled to explain the need for cuts. Albuquerque Public Schools announced this spring that it anticipates a budget shortfall of about $25 million.
“That might sound crazy,” the district wrote in a blog post, acknowledging the influx of federal aid. But it explained that enrollment declines have accelerated amid the pandemic, with the student population falling to 73,000 from 85,000 in just six years.
In California, which announced last month that enrollment had fallen by an additional 110,283 students, Oakland’s planned school closures are leading to protests. The ACLU filed a complaint last month alleging that they disproportionately affect Black students and families.