Following three consecutive years of falling enrollment, DPS administrators and board members are faced with a potential $9 million budget shortfall after the district failed to aggressively respond to trends its leaders had anticipated.
“It was a bit of a perfect storm,” said Rob Gould, president of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association.
Despite enrollment dropping in the past three years, the number of schools in the district has stayed roughly the same. As of 2022, the district operated 202 schools and taught 87,864 students, according to data from theThis trend is most notable in schools serving elementary students, which have experienced the largest declines for the longest period of time.Enrollment among elementary-aged children began falling after 2014, but the number of schools serving the group has largely remained flat.
For years, the district’s growth had hinged on its ability to bring more Denver children — many of whom might have once attended school elsewhere — into DPS classrooms. Instead, former DPS employees and board members said the district hasn’t closed enough schools in recent years, particularly in areas where there are fewer children.after nearly a decade at the district’s helm.
DPS had shunned school choice in the 1990s, even challenging the constitutionality of a provision in Colorado’s. The case rose all the way to the state’s highest court and questioned whether the State Board of Education could order a local school board to approve a charter school application it previously had rejected. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled in 1999 that the provision was constitutional.
Many of the city’s children were opting to attend schools in neighboring districts or private schools and it was a problem DPS officials once estimated cost them not only thousands of students, but millions of dollars. With new homes came families and the need for more schools. But different neighborhoods had different needs and wants.
DPS leaders believed that by improving school performance, they could draw students living in some of Denver’s fastest-growing neighborhoods back to the district, documents show. DPS leaders knew at least by 2015 that falling birth rates might affect enrollment in the district, documents show.Click to enlarge. An interactive version of the map follows the story., an achievement public health officials long have attributed to increased access to long-term birth control.
As with Denver, the shift in Douglas County’s population is tied to real estate. In the 1990s, residential development took off in Douglas County. This also happened to be the time that many Gen Xers were in their 20s and 30s and of an age to buy a home, Garner said., because many of those Gen Xers are in their 50s, not having babies and not moving. They’re aging in place, she said.
But there isn’t a precise way to look at home prices and tell that, if they rise a certain amount, then it will change how many children are living in a neighborhood, Eschbacher said. Elementary schools in northwest Denver were so filled with students that in 2012 the district was weighing the potential need for new “offerings” in the region.
One report showed an aerial image of a single city block in northwest Denver that transformed from having 22 residential units with 13 DPS students in 2005 to having 48 units with four students in 2014. The problem spread across the city and, except for San Francisco, Denver saw more widespread gentrification than any other U.S. metro area between 2013 and 2017, according to a study by theDPS’s planning reports show that district officials knew high housing prices were going to curtail enrollment gains, but Eschbacher said prices surpassed their predictions.
Students also became more affluent. More than 70% of DPS students qualified for free-or-reduced lunch in 2012, compared to the 59% who qualified in 2021, according to the report.DPS is not alone in struggling with plunging enrollment. Districts across the U.S. are emerging from the pandemic and finding that they are facing another crisis.‘ board voted in November to close 16 elementary schools in neighboring Jefferson County. Most of that closures will occur later this year.
Marrero, DPS’ superintendent, said in response to emailed questions that his predecessors began addressing falling enrollment once “they started to see huge dips in the number of children born in certain Denver neighborhoods back in 2015.” In 2018, DPS announced for the first time in years that it wasn’t calling for any specific new schools to be built and began pulling back on its policy of closing schools with low test scores.
“It’s now in their hands as the governing body of this district,” said Anne Bye Rowe, who served on the board from 2011 to 2019.
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