East Valley school district shrink factors moderate, demographer says
Courtesy of Applied Economics
This list shows how many competitors the Chandler Unified district has in the East Valley that are educating the 10,500 students living in the district who don’t attend a CUSD school. An Oct. 7 presentation by the firm Applied Economics was when demographer Rick Brammer said he believes the district enrollment will drop by about 7,500 students over the next 10 years.
Courtesy of Applied Economics
This graph shows the hold-the-line, continued annual enrollment loss low line and the middle line showing a drop of about 7,500 Chandler Unified students that demographer Rick Brammer believes will happen over the next 10 years.
Decreasing birth rates, high housing costs and the growth of charter and private schools have all been mentioned and discussed as reasons Chandler Unified and some other Arizona public school districts are shrinking in enrollment.
But the demographers who’ve been reporting to the CUSD Governing Board and district administrators for years see some slowing in the decline and think the district will, over the next decade, drop somewhere in between the best- and worst-case scenarios in terms of falling enrollment.
Rick Brammer, of Applied Economics, along with assistant Don Graves, made what’s become an annual presentation to the board on the changing demographics of the district Oct. 7.
The pair presented many elements, trends and changes in trends in terms of the number of school-age children living in the district and how many parents choose to send their children to a public school and/or to a Chandler Unified school.
The district’s last listed average daily membership, or ADM multiplier number, is 38,119. It was above 43,000 for the district’s 40-plus campuses as recently as 2022 and has gone down by 7,744 students since the start of the 2019-20 school year, Brammer said.
“You guys (Chandler Unified), if you continued to lose 1.8% of service rate per year, which I don’t think you will, with the voucher program saturating, you’d lose 10,000 more students between now and 2037,” Brammer said. “But I don’t think that will happen. I also don’t think you’ll be able to maintain a service level of about 62% and only lose 2,500 more. So, realistically, I think you’re looking at 7,500 fewer kids by 2037.”
Brammer said every public school district in Arizona is dealing with shrinking numbers of students.
“You’re not alone,” Brammer said. “Virtually every established public district across the state is losing students, mainly from the bottom (few grade levels).”
Brammer said Chandler Unified, which grew incredibly fast as homes were built in large numbers in the late ‘90s through the mid-2010s, only stopped growing as recently as 2019.
“And then, COVID-19 hit, and for the higher socio-economic districts, the students who left public education in those areas, they didn’t come back,” Brammer said. “So for this school year, what’s scary is you have 1,826 kindergartners and 4,047 high school seniors — a 2,200 drop before we even start.”
He said in much the same way Chandler was growing in the youngest grades throughout much of the 2000s and through about 2013-14, the K-3 cohorts have been the ones leading the decline in the 2020s, each incoming class smaller than the previous one.
Brammer said the rapid charter school expansion of the past 10 to 15 years, while it eventually involved high schools, was initially mostly a K-8 model.
“The CUSD enrollment in K-8 went down much faster than the overall lack of students living in the area, because many of the charters were K-8,” Brammer said. “And so for a while, we had a gap between what we saw in eighth grades and in high schools, though that gap has narrowed as (CUSD) high school enrollments have finally dipped.”
Brammer points out that there are still about 600 students in each freshman class total across CUSD’s six high schools than there are eighth-graders in the district. But district administrators have had to defend keeping several schools open — especially K-6 elementaries — while they operate well below building capacity.
Brammer said birth rates for Arizona, which declined by nearly one-third from a peak in 2006, have leveled off at around 78,000 the past few years.
“So we probably know where the bottom is, but it’s a long road back, both in terms of more births happening statewide and in terms of each district getting a sort of fair share for each kindergarten cohort,” Brammer said.
Brammer said Chandler is aging as well.
“With interest rates being what they are, we see fewer and fewer homeowners younger than 55 — the ones who tend to have kids,” Brammer said.
There are also 10,500 students living within Chandler Unified’s map that attend school somewhere besides CUSD, he said. The ESA, or voucher program, affects the district, though not as harshly as it does others.
Brammer said even with so many factors working against it, Chandler is a district far better positioned than others in the state, some of which are experiencing 25% declines that affect all aspects of funding and staffing.
Graves, looking at planned and recently developed housing, sees more of the same when it comes to most of the new single-family home construction moving further and further to the southeast.
This includes not only the farthest southeast corner of the city of Chandler, near Basha High School, but also the parts of Gilbert and Queen Creek served by the district.
When it comes to the north-central, oldest part of the city of Chandler, Graves said, he thinks families will be moving into newer public housing or, longer-term, targeted redevelopments like Southside Village, but much of downtown development isn’t going to bring in families with school-age children.
“The high-end apartments we’re seeing aren’t going to help change district enrollment much,” Graves said.
Brammer said the new larger projects in the southeast part of the district will be so expensive, that combined with the lower birth rate, not nearly as many children will move into those homes as would, say, 15 years ago.
He said the voucher program — along with changes to it — have made it much tougher to predict public-school enrollment trends.
Board member Kurt Rohrs said regarding the voucher program, some associations have discovered they need brick-and-mortar facilities, suggesting Chandler could look into making some income from renting out facilities to such organizations.
Watch Applied Economics’ entire presentation and board questions by clicking here.
Jason W. Brooks News Editor | Chandler Independent
Jason W. Brooks joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in July 2021 as an associate editor. After a year covering Buckeye, he has covered Chandler since the fall of 2022, in addition to assisting the Daily Independent throughout his time at INI.
Education: University of New Mexico, bachelor of arts in journalism and mass communication, print emphasis, English minor.
Random Fact: He and his siblings witnessed a Space Shuttle launch and landing in the same year in person, on opposite coasts.
Hobbies: Karaoke, bicycling and American Sign Language.
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