After briefly falling below 1,000 students in grades K-12 for the years 2020 and 2021, the Harvard School District’s enrollments are back above that benchmark this year. If the School Committee’s projections are correct, 2020’s 986 students will prove to have been the low point of Harvard’s school enrollments. In 2021 the number rose to 999 students. And this year the total stands at 1,005. Looking ahead, the School Committee projections show the number of K-12 students slowly rising from 1,015 next year to 1,233 in 2031 (see graph below).
The School Committee has been projecting an end to declining enrollments since 2019, but the turnaround may have been delayed a year or so by the COVID-19 pandemic. Some parents held off sending their 5-year-olds to kindergarten in the fall 2020, when the pandemic was in full swing. That led to an unusually large number of kindergartners entering school the following year, in the fall of 2021.
The major factor influencing enrollments is the birth rate in Harvard. Projections start with the number of babies born in a year and then look ahead five years, to when those children scamper off to school. This year has already seen a sharp uptick in the number of births—42 by early October, and possibly more than 50 by the end of December. That’s a big jump, compared to the 20 to 30 births in most years since 2012. (Might the increase have something to do with people working at home?) This mini baby boom will enter kindergarten in 2027.
By the time those Harvard-born babies reach kindergarten, they are usually joined by an even greater number of children who were not born here but whose families moved to town in the intervening years. So a second major factor in school enrollments is the real estate market, which can be even more volatile than the birth rate.
In most years during the past two decades, 70 or more houses in Harvard have changed hands each year, except for a drop during the recession between 2008 and 2011. Despite the pandemic, sales topped 90 in 2020 and were high again at 86 in 2021. Those numbers likely contribute to rising school enrollments.
But rising interest rates may cause the real estate market to cool down in the near future. Sales have been lower so far in 2022. If fewer new families with children move into town, that could lower the projected enrollments. Only time will tell.
