Facing sudden enrollment drop, Phoenix Union launches marketing campaign

Advertisements for Phoenix Union High School District will soon be popping up on televisions and in social media feeds and mailboxes as part of a campaign to halt a drop in enrollment.

It's an effort to bring back students who have left the district, according to Richard Franco, the district's marketing and communications director. Phoenix Union started the 2023-24 school year with significantly fewer students than last year, he said.

Enrollment in the first week of school was down by over 1,500 from last year after having risen the two prior school years, according to a presentation at the Dec. 7 governing board meeting.

Sherry Celaya, the district's chief financial officer, told the board during the meeting that at week 15, the district had 26,566 students — 1,322 less than that time last year.

The governing board voted Dec. 7 to fund the marketing campaign with a maximum of $3 million from the third round of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief money granted by the federal government in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The new campaign is "fundamentally about outreach to show our families what we have to offer and focus on the students that left us," Franco said.

He added that unintended outcomes could include reaching families that "may not have seen Phoenix Union as an option in the first place."

According to the most recently available data from the Arizona Department of Education, during the 2021-22 school year — before the enrollment drop that prompted the campaign — about 38% of public school students living within Phoenix Union's boundaries attended schools outside the district, meaning they attended charter schools or schools in another district through open enrollment.

That percentage is higher than some of Phoenix Union's East Valley neighbors. In Tempe Union, the share of public school students attending school outside the district was around 21%. In both Mesa Public Schools and Chandler Unified, it was about 26%.

In the 2022-23 school year, around 1,280 students from within Phoenix Union's boundaries attended schools in Tempe Union, according to a May presentation from Tempe Union's district demographer. Mountain Pointe, a Tempe Union high school in Ahwatukee, has four school bus routes that pick up students from Phoenix Union's boundaries in the South Mountain area; other schools have bus routes that stop there as well.

New marketing strategy to 'saturate' school communities

Phoenix Union's marketing effort will last until next September, which is the deadline for school districts to spend the third and final round of ESSER funding.

Typically, the district's marketing efforts — funded by a budget of around $550,000 a year — are concentrated on short-term campaigns for events like a job fair or an exposition, Franco said. They market the district as a whole and generally don't promote individual schools, he said.

The pandemic relief dollars presented an opportunity for a new kind of campaign that can highlight each of the district's schools and their individual brands, Franco said.

The $3 million — though much larger than the district's typical marketing budget — is a small slice of the approximately $111 million the district received from the third round of ESSER funding, which is intended to support school districts' recovery from the pandemic and requires 20% be set aside to address learning loss. Phoenix Union's pandemic relief dollars have also been used for tutoring, credit recovery and summer school programs to address learning loss, student and staff wellness initiatives, professional development and technology and facilities investments, Franco said.

Through the new campaign, the district will market its schools to their respective communities in both English and Spanish with digital, social media and television advertising, billboards and postcards.

"We're basically going to be putting together campaigns that saturate the school communities that they serve," Franco said. They'll highlight individual schools' offerings like dual enrollment, AP coursework and career and technical education classes.

The campaign will also spotlight the district's small specialty schools, which include a coding academy, a bioscience school, a police and fire school, a college preparatory school, an online school, a hybrid school with flexible schedules and a new preparatory school for aspiring educators.

Phoenix Union is also trying other ways to bring students back, including through a new "engagement center" to reach out to students who recently withdrew. The center is also funded by COVID relief dollars, but the district plans to continue operating it with other funding sources once the pandemic relief money expires.

Celaya said at the Dec. 7 meeting that other strategies to stop enrollment decline include investments in safety and campus and climate culture. The district is currently piloting weapons detectors at two schools where students brought guns to campus in the past year, including Bostrom High School, where a student was arrested in May after, police say, he brought an AR-15 rifle and ammunition to school.

Other Phoenix-area districts also face enrollment declines

Phoenix Union is not the only Valley school district looking for ways to manage enrollment declines.

The Paradise Valley Unified School District, which has schools in northeast Phoenix and Scottsdale, is considering closing four schools in response to declining enrollment.

Alhambra Elementary has seen declining enrollment since at least the 2017-18 school year.

Scottsdale Unified's enrollment has declined by about 19% since 2010, largely due to an aging population, increasing housing prices and enrollment in nearby charter schools, according to an April presentation from the district's demographer.

Tempe Union High School District's enrollment has declined by about 10% since 2013, according to a May presentation from the district's demographer.

Mesa Public Schools has also seen declining enrollment over the past decade, especially in kindergarten, according to the district's assistant superintendent, Scott Thompson.

Still, in rapidly growing parts of the Valley like Buckeye and Queen Creek, some school districts are grappling with the challenges of increasing enrollment.

In Phoenix Union, Franco said he doesn't know whether there is a specific reason for the significant drop in enrollment this year.

"We know that safety's been a topic," he said. "We also know that there's just a lot of families that don't know what we have to offer."

Reach the reporter at mparrish@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: How Phoenix Union hopes to halt enrollment drop with COVID funds