An Expedition into Enrollment Numbers

It seemed like a fairly straightforward question.

The Cedar Rapids School District is considering school closures and boundary changes, due, in large part, to declining enrollment. And officials have lamented often how the 2008 flood caused steady declines to nose dive.

So I wondered about the size of the nose dive. How many students left the district as a result of flooding?

I checked the district's comprehensive enrollment report, a hefty work of consultantry looming large in the current debate, and found a chart of past enrollments on page 20. It showed that between the school year before the flood, 2007-08, and the year after, 2008-09, K-12 enrollment increased by 139. Can't be right. Another chart in the same report showed a loss of 129.

The district provided numbers that peg the pre-to-post-flood drop at 416, although that's an overall number not necessarily tied directly to the flood. The state's Basic Education Data System shows a 349-student drop. Other state spreadsheets I found depicting “certified enrollment” and “budget enrollment” gave still more differing answers. I may never know for sure.

But my time wasn't wasted. If you dig around enrollment figures long enough, it becomes clear that the flood isn't the big story.

For instance, according to state education reports, 928 students used open enrollment to leave the Cedar Rapids district this school year, compared to 388 coming in the door. That's a net loss of 540 students, and that loss gap is growing.

Just four years ago, the loss gap was 250. Then 356, 429 and now 540. Ten years ago it was 164. What's happening?

When the public debate is about losses worsened by watery woes and other circumstances out of your control, the solution is closing schools. Painful. Can't be helped.

But when the debate is about kids fleeing a district to get an education elsewhere, then it becomes about educational quality. Customer satisfaction. And, so far, no one has explained how closing schools fixes those things. Talk has so far centered mainly on managing inevitable decline and stabilizing reserve funds.

Speaking of bucks, every student who leaves takes $5,883 in state aid with him or her. Slicing that 540 loss gap down to around 200, near where it was just five years ago, and you gain $2 million. That's roughly what the district says it saves by closing schools.

Imagine having a full-court, wide-open, months-long process aimed at creating schools that families would flock to, instead of a painful, less-than-open, months-long process aimed at shutting down and shuffling deck chairs. Imagine fundamentally changing the way you do business, instead of going out of business.