Montgomery County’s public schools are seeing a drop in student enrollment, a development the Maryland school system’s superintendent, Thomas Taylor, called “significant.”
“We’ve seen a sharp decrease in student enrollment,” Taylor explained in a Monday night presentation at the Montgomery County Board of Education offices. “We are down 2,600 students from last year.”
Currently, there are 156,541 students enrolled in Montgomery County Public Schools.
“Our international enrollments are also sharply down,” Taylor said.
And while he didn’t elaborate on what might be causing that, he said it was “worth pointing out.”
What’s to blame?
During Tuesday’s Board of Education meeting, Donald Connelly, the capital budget and projects manager for MCPS, told board members that the number of live births in Montgomery County has been dropping.
“What that does is that translates five years later, six years later to kindergarteners,” Connelly said, drawing a correlation between the decreasing birth rate to the school enrollment data.
Connelly showed a graphic that illustrated projections for continued enrollment declines heading into 2031.
He said the school system is anticipating a loss of 6,000 students over the next six years. That would bring the enrollment figures down to 149,706 from a high of 165,267 in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite the declining enrollment projections, Taylor said, “It doesn’t change the size of our portfolio,” referring to the total 238 school buildings in the school system.
“One of the most pressing issues right now is our investment in early childhood education,” Taylor said.
So even if enrollment in the K-12 level keeps declining, space in the system’s school buildings — including special schools — would still be useful, he added.
“Even though we have less students attending our schools, we do want to expand our pre-K enrollment,” Montgomery County School Board member Karla Silvestre said Tuesday. “Well, now, we might be able to adjust, and be able to fit more of our pre-K (in existing schools) and be able to meet that strategic priority.”
Changes in population
Montgomery County’s school system, the largest in the state of Maryland, has seen population booms and busts over the years.
“There’s a cyclical nature to some of this,” County Executive Marc Elrich said during a news briefing on Wednesday. “As people move in, they raise families, and the parents stay in the houses even after the children leave.”
From 1950-1970, 155 schools were built to deal with the growth the county was experiencing.
With enrollment declines from 1972-1983, about 60 schools were closed. But another population boom from 1983-2000 saw the county in the position of having to reopen or build 47 schools to accommodate the growth.
Speculating on the drop in what the school system refers to as “international” students, Elrich said it could in part be attributed to the declining national immigration rate.
“I’d say part of it’s going to be due to Trump’s actions around deportation, where people have either already been deported or are worried about being deported,” and have left the U.S. on their own, Elrich said.
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