As public school districts across Arizona announce school closures, the Common Sense Institute has launched a dashboard to track the impact of shifting K-12 enrollment trends.
The Common Sense Institute is a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank that studies fiscal issues in the state.
Glenn Farley is the institute’s director of policy and research. He said public school districts expanded spending in recent years due to significant funding increases but still face lower student enrollment and excess capacity.
“The data suggests there’s two drivers of the enrollment declines," Farley said. "One we can’t really change or do anything about and that’s sort of the demographic change. There’s simply fewer children today than there were five years ago and there will be fewer children, still, at current rates, five years from now.”
The other, Farley said, is a preference change. People are not choosing their local public schools as often.
"The reason they're choosing alternatives like charter schools, private schools, or homeschooling is curriculum changes, safety and environment changes," Farley said. "And they don't like some of those changes so they're simply choosing not to enroll."
Farley said some people expected enrollment numbers to bounce back after the pandemic, but they never did.
"I think it’s no longer a case of whether [it will be] a couple of years and then we’ll go back to the way the world worked in 2019," he said. "Instead it’s a case of this is the new normal. This is now how the world is likely to work in the medium term.”
