Chandler Unified enrollment faces 10-year slide

Aug. 15—It was not a surprise that enrollment dropped in the Chandler Unified School District when the COVID-19 pandemic began.

The district lost more than 2,000 students then.

What it is a surprise, however, is that those students did not return. And they did not go to charter schools either.

"There was no bounce back, it's just that enrollment continued to be down by 2,000 students," said Rick Brammer of Applied Economics, the demographics expert who has worked with the district for more than two decades.

Brammer during an Aug. 9 study session gave the CUSD Governing Board an update on the district's demographics and what its likely future enrollment trend looks like.

The main takeaway: enrollment is in decline and will continue to drop over the next decade.

There are a number of contributing factors:

—Birth rates are in decline. "Birth rates in Arizona fell by nearly 19% during the Great Recession, causing a 17% decline in the total number of births in the state," Brammer said. "The birth rate stabilized from 2011 to 2014 and then dropped another 16.5% through 2020; his resulted in 76,400 births, which was 11.9% fewer than in 2014." Since 2020, they have slightly increased.

—Housing prices are steep, which means young families with children can't afford to live here. East Valley homeowners won't give up their homes if they have low mortgage interest rates because they won't find comparable ones and that lack of turnover is keeping young families with children out of the market.

—Compounding the affordability problem affecting the housing market, Chandler is near build-out and has little space left to build single-family homes. What space Chandler does have is increasingly going toward high-end multifamily housing, which in general does not attract families with school-age children.

—Increased competition from charter and private schools, the latter benefitting from the expansion of Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, or school vouchers.

Brammer said that while charter schools are a challenge for the district, it's not the biggest unknown. That would be school vouchers.

"In 2020-to-2023 charter schools only gained 8,000 and district schools went down a couple of thousand," Brammer said. "We know the school-age population went up by a lot more than that. The number of ESAs went from 9,000 to 49,000."

Lana Berry, the district's chief financial officer, said the state is reporting 69,000 have applied and been granted ESAs this year.

"We have seen across the Valley ... is that choice requires resources, it requires knowledge of the choice and it requires the ability to take advantage," Brammer said. "What we saw was that in lower socio-economic districts, most of the students came back. And here (CUSD), Gilbert, Paradise Valley, they did not. Generally, it is the same story in Scottsdale."

Brammer said CUSD has 16,000 students living within its borders who are attending charter schools. The good news, he said, is that 6,000 students that live outside its borders commute to attend CUSD schools because of its reputation for quality instruction.

The lack of certainty because of ESAs make it difficult to project with confidence CUSD's future enrollment, Brammer said. Still, he expects the district to lose close to 4,400 students over the next decade.

Berry said based on their early enrollments this year, the district already has 800 fewer students than last year — more than double the 300 that Brammer expected a year ago.

The projection had at least one board member wondering why the district is building a new school.

"Wait a second," Kurt Rohrs said. "Galveston: We're about to spend $30 million rebuilding that school to a capacity of 750, and we're not getting above 500, and there's absolutely no growth in that area.

"There is nothing to indicate we can fill up that school. I'm really starting to wonder why we're doing this."

The actual cost will be closer to $35 million, said Tom Dunn, the district's executive director of support services. And, he said, more than $11 million has already been committed after the board approved spending more than $9 million at the Aug. 9 meeting to procure materials it will need.

Rohrs was the only no vote after failing to get a second on his motion to delay approving the expense.

Galveston had 439 students last year. Brammer projects the school's enrollment will rise to 470 by the spring of 2033.

Berry said when the district first began discussing the Galveston rebuild, the thought then was that nearby San Marcos Elementary would be repurposed. Then most of those students would end up at Galveston.

However, last spring after the San Marcos community rose up, the district decided to keep it open.

Superintendent Frank Narducci, however, warned them that the district would not be able to keep the school open if its enrollment dropped below 300.

There is still a chance San Marcos could close at some point. That school had an enrollment of 335 last year. Brammer projects its enrollment will drop to 296 in about 10 years.

Narducci said that some Galveston families chose to send their kids to new charter schools, in part, because they had newer facilities. He said he expects a bump in attendance once the new Galveston school is built.

Brammer said there is little the district can do about its declining enrollment.

Parents between the ages of 25 and 44, when most people have school-age children, are not moving to Chandler because the median price of a home here is around $550,000, about $100,000 higher than the rest of the Valley.

Instead, they are moving to Queen Creek, Maricopa and Buckeye.

"The level of turnover in this district is very, very low, as is the ... availability of affordable housing. So those are going to continue to work against us."

And he said the district does pretty well against charter schools, whose enrollments have also stagnated.

"In your district and in a lot of other established areas, they had kind of saturated themselves. If they'd opened another one, they were just cannibalizing themselves. So, we kind of had that under control.

"Now, the ESAs give us a whole other thing to get a handle on. How big is it going to get? Is it going to be capped? Those are the things that make projections so difficult to do, because we don't know the environments that exist."