CPS enrollment continues to plummet: ‘I would have never imagined seeing this steep of a decline’
Chicago Public Schools enrollment has dropped again, this time to 330,411 students, about 10,000 fewer kids than last year, according to numbers the district released Wednesday.
“When I was in CPS my first year, in 2003, we were just under 440,000 students. Even then I was seeing declines of about 3,000 students or so. I would have never imagined seeing this steep of a decline,” new CPS CEO Pedro Martinez told reporters.
“For me, it’s not just looking at what’s happening today, but what’s going to happen over the next five years.”
Enrollment is down 3% compared to the 340,658 students counted in the last school year — when the COVID-19 pandemic was well underway — and 7% versus the 355,156 students in the 2019-20 year. The figures cover more than 600 schools, which include district-run, charter and contract schools.
Those who recently departed CPS include 17,888 students who left for a school outside Chicago; 3,129 who transferred to a Chicago private school; 2,026 who dropped out; and 1,393 who decided to home school. The district said it does not know the whereabouts of a few thousand students who did not come to school. CPS also gained 43,535 new students this year.
At an unrelated news conference Wednesday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said it’s a “minor miracle” that CPS is “only” down 10,000 students due to the pandemic and other disruptions. She said it’s a testament to the hard work of CPS staff to keep students engaged.
CPS noted declines in elementary school enrollment and in communities such as Pilsen, Little Village and Lincoln Park, with Martinez vowing to conduct a neighborhood-by-neighborhood analysis of program offerings. The racial makeup of the district has not changed much over the last few years, with nearly 47% of students identifying as Latino, 36% Black, nearly 11% white and 4% Asian.
At Wednesday’s Chicago Board of Education meeting, CPS officials discussed implementing an exit survey to learn reasons behind student departures. Board president Miguel del Valle also suggested comparing 2020 census data, which showed slight city growth over the last decade, to the enrollment declines communities have experienced.
Board Vice President Sendhil Revuluri called the school data “kind of a bucket of cold water. It is challenging to figure out what to do, but I’m very sure that we will do much better if we actually confront the reality and not try to ignore it. I’ve heard good ideas of trying to build understanding, build connection, engage communities and then respond to what we learn about why families are not having their kids in CPS.”
CPS leaders feared the enrollment drop could be worse. The district identified some 100,000 students as “at risk” of not re-enrolling this year and reached out through home visits, phone calls or a combination of both. Sara Kempner, executive director of enterprise data strategy, said the district is “tremendously proud” of its marketing efforts and found an overwhelming number of these students returned to school or graduated.
Not all the news was bad Wednesday. CPS is reporting increases in the ninth and 11th grades and preschool enrollment from the prior year. CPS may have retained the title of nation’s third largest school district. Last year CPS narrowly edged out Miami-Dade County Public Schools by about 7,000 students. A Miami-Dade spokesperson told the Tribune this month that 328,700 students are enrolled in its system.
Ten years ago, CPS reported about 404,000 students districtwide, and enrollment has declined every year since then.
Enrollment is recorded on the 20th day of school, which began a week earlier than usual this year. The Aug. 30 start date also represented the first time the district welcomed students back for full-time, in-person learning since the pandemic shut schools in March 2020. Martinez said he plans to research the effect of COVID-19 on enrollment numbers.
“The fact is that because there was some uncertainty about this school year, I’m concerned that that also had an impact on some of our families, either moving out of the city or — and it’s not big numbers — but even going to private school,” Martinez told reporters.
Kristin Cunningham said she opted to enroll her son in a private high school this year instead of continuing at CPS because “the public school system in Chicago is slipping backward.”
“I feel confident that our family’s decision to send our child to a private high school will provide the stability and in-person education over the next four years that CPS could not due to the teachers’ strikes and threats at every turn,” Cunningham told the Tribune, referencing the historically contentious relationship between CPS and the Chicago Teachers Union.
“After living through long strikes during our child’s kindergarten and seventh grade years, we wanted a school that could put the kids’ needs first and work out their issues by not interrupting school for headlines.”
In a statement Wednesday, CTU president Jesse Sharkey pointed a finger at Lightfoot and said she needs to spend COVID-19 relief funds for “transformative investments to reverse decades of inequity and neglect” instead of “piecemeal investments that act as Band-Aids” to stem further enrollment drops.
The teachers union and CPS have been meeting regularly to bargain over a COVID-19 safety agreement for this school year. CPS has reported 1,753 student coronavirus cases and 469 adult cases since the start of school. A small group of CPS parents and community members rallied before the board meeting Wednesday to call for a remote learning option for everyone and more coronavirus safety measures.
CTU representatives told reporters this week that CPS “continues to reject” its proposals, which include testing students weekly unless parents opt their children out of the COVID-19 testing program, and hiring more nurses, social workers and substitute teachers. Martinez, however, painted a rosier picture of negotiations and the outlook of the pandemic.
“I would say that we are actually now turning the corner on COVID, between our improvement in contact tracing, our improvement in our capacity for COVID testing, as well as the fact that vaccines are coming for 5- to 11-year-olds. I think we’re actually on the other side of this,” Martinez told reporters.
“And so we’re going to continue to talk with the CTU. I’ve had dinner with the leadership. We’ve committed to ... an ongoing conversation.”
Martinez may have a tough time persuading some families to come back to CPS. John Fitzgerald told the Tribune he has “zero regrets” sending his third-grader to Saint Andrew School instead of back to Augustus H. Burley School in Lakeview. He praised the smaller class sizes and larger sense of community at St. Andrew.
“There were 50 new families at St. Andrew this year. The ones we have encountered have all said they are very happy,” Fitzgerald said.
“Before the year started, my son said he was only switching for a year and then he was going back to Burley. We just asked him ... what he thought and he said, ‘No, I want to stay at St. Andrew.’”
Chicago Tribune reporter Gregory Pratt contributed to this report.
