Immigration swells schools enrollment
Report: New highrises, private school changes also fuel ‘dramatic’ increase in students
STAMFORD — Each school year comes with its own surprises, but this year has already delivered hundreds.
Hundreds of additional students, that is.
Compared to last year’s October enrollment of 16,082 students, the district counted 16,652 children in Stamford Public Schools as of Oct. 1, a surge of 570.
“That’s a significant amount. Over the last years, increases were 150, 200 or 220 students, but 570 is a large number,” said Judith Singer, the district’s research director, in charge of tracking student enrollment.
The increase is a net number. A total of 1,045 new students entered the school system this year.
Board of Education President Andy George agreed, calling the rise in students “dramatic.”
The last time the district commissioned an enrollment audit, the company MGT Consulting Group predicted an enrollment high of 16,567 students by the 202627 school year. It is seven years early and the district is already 85 students over that projection.
“It will probably take the next three years to determine whether this is a fluke or whether or not this actually is something we need to pay attention to.” Tamu Lucero, superintendent of schools
Immigration the largest contributor
The increase is the result of multiple factors, according to the district’s enrollment report, released Friday.
“New arrivals” to the country who are English Learners and qualify for language support, or ELs in district parlance, account for the biggest jump.
Last year, fewer than 200 of the district’s 823 new students qualified as new arrivals, but this year, that number has more than doubled, Superintendent of Schools Tamu Lucero said.
Of the 1,045 this year, 458 — or 43.8 percent — are ELs compared with 189 — or 23 percent — of new students who were EL last year.
Stamford’s increase in EL students tracks with Danbury and Norwalk, which also have seen an influx in their EL student population.
In Norwalk, more than 300 new immigrant
students enrolled in the city’s schools this year, many coming from Nicaragua and Honduras.
Stamford does not mandate its students report their immigration status and country of origin, but several clues indicate a similar trend of largescale immigration from Central and South America.
Hispanic students in the district increased nearly five percent this year, from 39.6 percent to 44.5 percent districtwide. A total of 156 students said they entered Stamford schools from Guatemala and an additional 50 reported coming to the city from schools in other Central and South American countries, according to the report.
Anecdotally, Catalina Horak, the executive director of Building One Community, an immigrant resource center in Stamford, said the organization has seen a “significant increase” in recent months in the number of people who have come across the U.S.Mexico border and are looking for legal representation for asylum claims.
“If they’re coming with young children and looking for legal help, that automatically means they’ve been in a detention center because you can’t have come recently if you weren’t at a detention center and processed from there,” Horak said.
Before, Building One was approached with about two or three cases each month of children needing legal help, but in the past few months, it’s has had a monthly minimum of 10 from families with young children reaching out for legal representation, Horak said.
Charter and private school changes
While a large contributor to enrollment growth, immigration is only part of the story.
“We’re a district that experienced a lot this year,” said Lucero, citing the closing of Trailblazers Academy, a charter middle school, just six weeks before the start of the school year as another driver of the population increase.
Trailblazers was run by the Stamfordbased nonprofit group Domus and closed due to financial difficulties. The school was set to house 120 students this year, and as a result of its closure, 95 students instead came to Stamford Public Schools, according to the district’s report.
Many of these students require an alternative education program, so, in six weeks, the district set out to create an alternative education program at the middle school level for the first time. The program consolidated with the high school alternative education programs; together, they moved to 68 Southfield Ave., which formerly housed a private daycare.
All of the district’s alternative education programs now fall under the banner of SPS Anchor at the 14,000squarefoot Southfield facility, which serves about 103 students and is expected to cost the district an additional $1.2 million in staffing costs this year.
The nearclosure of Stamford’s Trinity Catholic High School also played a role in the enrollment change.
In May, Diocese of Bridgeport Bishop Frank J. Caggiano announced the school experienced its biggest enrollment drop on record for the coming school year and faced closure if not enough students registered.
Weeks later, Caggiano announced the school would continue with expected enrollment of about 200 students for the 201920 school year, a sharp decline compared to 201415, when Trinity had 436 students.
The district estimates 64 students entered Stamford Public Schools this year from Catholic schools, including Trinity.
Highrise development
Stamford, generally, is a growing city and the new construction of highrise apartment buildings in the South End and on Atlantic Street and Washington Boulevard also contributed to the enrollment surge.
“In years past, highrises included small numbers of schoolage children. This pattern may be changing,” the report noted, citing an additional 84 students who joined the district from five large, recentlybuilt buildings.
“In Harbor Point we saw an increase, more than what we typically see coming out of Harbor Point,” Lucero said.
Still, Stamford’s Director of Economic Development Thomas Madden said the number of students stemming from these buildings compared to the number of units going up is small.
“We’ve had 3,200 new apartments built in the South End over the past five years. When you think about 84 students from 3,200 units, it’s not that many,” Madden said.
Stamford’s growth, both in terms of residential development and student enrollment, is an outlier compared to its more suburban surrounding communities.
“Stamford is one of the only places that is opening schools,” said Lucero, noting the district’s addition of Strawberry Hill School, which opened in 2016.
This week Westport, just up the shore from Stamford, was presented with a “striking” drop in student enrollment with 122 fewer students than predicted.
“As we see in many of our client communities, and Westport’s no different, your student body, your immigration, your school system is driven by the sales of a lot of new or existing single family homes,” consultant Mike Zuba told the Westport Board of Education at its meeting Monday night. “Overall, we’re seeing a large dip this year in housing sales.”
The present and the future
Overall, Lucero said the district has responded well to the influx and is excited to welcome back returning and firsttime students. The district reassigned teachers to growth areas and added seven new teachers at the elementary level in addition to more elective classes at the high schools.
“We are still hiring teachers . ... It’s normal that we have this shift but we do have a larger amount of openings this year than we’ve had in the past,” the superintendent said.
“It will probably take the next three years to determine whether this is a fluke or whether or not this actually is something we need to pay attention to,” said Lucero, adding that regardless the district is looking for new spaces for schools to replace the district’s many aging buildings.
All the added students present a financial challenge, especially as the district prepares its budget for next school year, George said.
“We know its a very tight budget year so higher enrollment is going to put more pressure on the operating costs and the facilities,” the school board president said.