Birth rate and housing hard to predict
Not so many years ago, Harvard was talking about the need for another school, possibly a new elementary school at Devens. Now, the school-age population is in rapid decline, and school officials are scrambling to make sense of it.
Since 2006, enrollment has fallen from a peak of 1,307 to 1,199 in 2013, an 8 percent drop in seven years. Official projections indicate that downward trend will continue for at least the next five years,
But some nearby towns have faced unexpected increases in student numbers. And any major change—up or down—will necessarily affect the education that Harvard students receive, as well as the dollar amount of the largest item in the town budget.
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Harvard’s enrollment study
According to a School Committee subcommittee on declining enrollment strategies, student numbers will drop even more steeply in the near future than they have in the recent past. Harvard lost an average of 20 students each year for the past seven years, but the study predicts the schools could lose almost 40 kids over each of the next five years. By 2019, the report predicts, Harvard might have only 960 students in grades K-12.
The study cites two major reasons for this decline. First, the number of babies born in Harvard (who scamper off to kindergarten five years later) was down from 50 in 1999 to 18 in 2013 (see chart that accompanies this article). Second, with fewer homes being sold or built, not enough new families were moving into Harvard to offset the low birth rate.
The predictions for gradual enrollment decline fit with a larger statewide trend. The school-age population has been declining across Massachusetts at least since 2000 and is expected to continue to do so for the next decade, if not longer. But the statewide decline is on a much more gradual slope than the predictions for Harvard.
Implications for school policies
At Monday evening’s School Committee meeting, member Keith Cheveralls presented a list of ways that declining enrollment might affect the committee’s policies. First, he proposed that the committee should establish a policy of incorporating enrollment into its financial and capital planning in more depth than it currently does.
Second, Cheveralls suggested that the district’s policy on class size—which was developed in an era of rising enrollments—might need to be reviewed and amended. Third, he suggested similar review and possible amendment for the district’s policy on the School Choice program.
And fourth, Cheveralls wrote that the School Committee and the Finance Committee “should establish a mutually agreed upon financial policy … around the financial implications springing from persistent trends in declining enrollment.”
The last of those recommendations refers to what the subcommittee report called “two philosophical approaches.” In the report, the subcommittee, composed of Superintendent Joe Connelly and School Committee members Bob Sullebarger and Kirsten Wright, identified two possible responses to the drop in the number of students. The schools could either “scale down costs in proportion to the decline” or “redirect resources … to support and enhance the current curriculum and educational opportunities.”
In the last sentence of its report, the subcommittee also recognized the role of the Finance Committee in such decisions, reasoning that the use of any cost savings resulting from declining enrollment “must be considered in the light of the expressed will and priorities of the people of the town and the budgetary guidance provided to the School Committee by the Finance Committee going forward.”
Changes in the schools
Already the School Committee has begun to make decisions based on the expected drop in the number of students. For example, only three sections of kindergarten are planned for next year, when enrollment is predicted to be about 44, down from 57 last fall.
The drop in enrollment would hit Hildreth Elementary School sooner than Bromfield. One result might be to empty some classrooms at HES, just as the School Committee is looking for new space for school administration offices. The committee has decided not to tackle the expensive maintenance and upgrades needed for the Bromfield House, where administration offices are now located.
Could extra classrooms be converted into administration office space? That’s probably not a good idea, according to Superintendent Joe Connelly. Connelly recognizes that enrollments will likely drop over the next five years, but he says that long-term trends are much harder to predict. If enrollments rise again, those classrooms could be needed in the future, and the money spent on converting them into offices would have been wasted.
Rather than converting classrooms, the School Committee might also consider enlarging the kindergarten wing or adding another floor above the existing structure. The School Committee has discussed amending Warrant Article 21 at the upcoming Town Meeting, which calls for a building assessment of the K wing, to include looking at the above options for adding office space.
All such plans for reuse of space depend on the accuracy of predictions for fewer students. But towns around this area present conflicting evidence of enrollment trends, with unpredictable ups and downs.
Enrollments on ‘a bungee cord’
The difficulty in predicting future enrollments shows clearly in the case of Carlisle, where enrollments “have been on a bungee cord,” according to one observer. Although regionalized with Concord at the high school level, Carlisle is comparable to Harvard for grades K-8.
Bill Fink of the Carlisle School Committee says that, like Harvard, Carlisle has seen a significant decline in enrollment after a “big bubble” of students graduated several years ago. Since then, K-8 enrollment has dropped from about 850 to about 650, with kindergarten enrollments flat for the past several years.
In 2013, however, kindergarten enrollment suddenly spiked to about 65, from a low of 45 a year earlier. Fink does not expect to see the student population climb back to its previous high, but for now, he says, “The decline in enrollment here seems over.”
Rising numbers in some
MetroWest towns
In December 2013 the Globe West headlined an article “Squeeze is on as student numbers rise.” The article focused on upsurges in Framingham and Natick, much larger systems than Harvard. Framingham administrator Mark Prince pointed out that, at the elementary school level, 200 more students were entering kindergarten than were moving on from fifth grade to middle school. Natick’s Superintendent Peter Sanchioni said that his town was “averaging an extra 100 students per year.”
In Leominster, kindergarten enrollments jumped unexpectedly from 433 in 2012 to 460 in fall 2013, according to Ann-Margaret Mitchell, assistant principal for early childhood in the Leominster public schools. She said much of the surge came in the last week before school opened, and it led to class sizes of up to 23 children at her school.
One of Harvard’s nearest neighbors, Littleton, has been “mostly flat” since the 1990s, according to Paul Avella, a school committee member. The district has about 1,600 kids from kindergarten through grade 12. But numbers may soon go up, Avella predicts, as the town is expecting a 40B housing development that will bring between 60 and 125 students to the Littleton school system.
A turnaround in Concord
Concord School Committee member Phil Benincasa says that his school system was taken by surprise last fall when a predicted increase of 50 students suddenly jumped to 125 new arrivals. Benincasa, who was also a longtime principal, said that three years ago Concord was also foreseeing a major decline in enrollment.
Benincasa attributes the sharp turnaround to two factors. First, Concord has seen a sizable development of housing for senior citizens. As a result, he said, quite a few older residents have downsized and sold their three- and four-bedroom houses to young families. Second, the town has just done a major school building program, and the new facilities are attracting people to the town.
Told that Harvard schools were predicting a substantial decline in enrollment, Benincasa laughed in disbelief. “Harvard’s reputation is so high,” he said, “it’s very unlikely that your enrollment is going to decrease.”
Falling numbers, difficult finances
Groton School Committee member Alison Manugian said that enrollment in the Groton-Dunstable district has been declining gradually over the past several years, and the committee expects the trend to continue. As a result, the Groton committee opened more Choice slots for this year. But the school committee there did not create a special subcommittee to consider the issue, she said, because the decline did not seem sharp enough at that point to affect policy decisions.
In Clinton, Superintendent Terrance Ingano says overall numbers there are going down, having dropped below 2,000 students. However, Clinton also lost 17 teachers in the past four years as a result of budget cuts, so class sizes have increased despite falling enrollment. Unlike Harvard, Clinton does not have a class-size policy. Ingano says, “Our class sizes are too high, especially at our elementary and middle school.”
Those large class sizes have led Clinton to turn away some students who wanted to attend under the Choice program, further contributing to enrollment decline. For the first time this year, Clinton had more students choicing out than in, with 135 leaving and 125 coming in. The drop in Choice students “means less money coming in, which affects the budget,” Ingano says.
Lunenburg’s Superintendent Loxi Jo Calmes reports that their enrollment has been declining since 2007, which was also when the decline began in Harvard. The number of students in the Lunenburg system fell from 1735 in 2007 to 1587 in 2013. But, as in Clinton, class sizes are increasing. “The declining enrollments coupled with the state and national financial crisis resulted in significant cutbacks that increased class size district wide (currently 22 to 26 students per class),” Calmes writes.
What might reverse the decline?
A new baby boom like the one from 1946 to 1964 seems highly unlikely. Superintendent Connelly says the low birth rate has been “the driving influence on enrollment, because Harvard has been such a stable community.”
But the real estate market is much more volatile than the birth rate. Sales of existing houses in Harvard from 1999 to 2005 were usually between 70 and 80 a year. Then sales fell into the 50-to-60 a year range until 2012. But in 2013, according to Harvard Realty, housing sales rebounded to 76. This may portend an influx of new families with young children.
In the period from 2001 to 2005, about 10 new houses were built in Harvard each year, as indicated by the issuance of building permits. From 2006 to 2011, the building of condos often outpaced that of single-family homes. If condo buyers are mainly Harvard empty-nesters who are selling their larger houses, the effect could be similar to that in Concord: an up-tick in enrollments as young families buy the retirees’ homes.
In addition, price trends may favor the Harvard area. At the close of 2013, the Globe West suggested that the real estate market in MetroWest communities was heating up. “With real estate prices closer to Boston exceeding pre-recession levels,” the lead said, “communities along Interstate 495 are growing in popularity among buyers.”
A chart of population projections by the Metropolitan Planning Council accompanied the article. It showed Harvard growing slowly, with only a 1 percent increase in population by 2030. But it was growth nonetheless. And some nearby towns were predicted to have double-digit growth, with Groton at 10 percent, Littleton at 12 percent, and Shirley at an eye-popping 19 percent.
How all these trends will affect Harvard school enrollments is still an open question. But the volatility suggests that Superintendent Connelly was correct when he said, “These things are cyclical.” What goes down may also come up.
Harvard Press intern Greg Maynard helped research this article.
