October surprise: Seattle schools enrollment doesn’t fall as expected

A funny thing has happened on the way to Seattle proposing to close a bunch of schools due to plunging enrollment.

The enrollment stubbornly failed to plunge.

In an October surprise of sorts, new figures show that the number of kids in classes did not drop as expected. The October enrollment, used to determine state funding, in fact ticked up for the first time since the 2019 school year, before the pandemic touched off an exodus.

The district counts enrollment two ways, one with preschoolers and Running Start high school students, and one without. By the first way, enrollment rose this year versus last by 206 students districtwide. By the second way, it eked up just 14.

Either way though, the totals are well above what was forecast as recently as last month — which was that the school system would continue its bleak pandemic-era spiral down.

Outside consultants estimated there’d be a drop of about 600 students this year.

That seemed reasonable given recent history. Seattle schools lost 830 students last year, and hemorrhaged a total of 3,700 during the three years prior. So while gaining 14 or 206 may not seem like headline news in a district with 49,000 kids, it is compared to what everybody thought was going to happen.

“It’s notable that the enrollment numbers … already exceed the (highest) figures being communicated by SPS during planning,” wrote Bryan Shalloway, a Seattle data scientist and former high school math teacher who brought the figures to my attention.

He’s referring to three different forecasts presented to the School Board in the run-up to the district trying to close up to 20 elementary schools. One forecast was from district staff, while the others came from two separate outside consultants. Each offered high, medium and low predictions, for a total of nine estimates.

The actual enrollment of 49,240 is higher than all nine of the guesses. It tops the worst forecasts by 1,000 students, and tops the midrange estimates — considered the most likely — by 400 to 600.

Good news, right?

I’d say so. It may not last, as big city districts all over the country are seeing declining enrollment, in part because of families leaving and lower birthrates.

But it’s a crucial sign of a reprieve in this drama. If nothing else, it’s a pause in the perpetual sense of crisis that hangs over Seattle schools. Enrollment isn’t down, at least for right now. Families were leaving, for whatever reasons, but they appear to have stopped.

Both preschool and kindergarten classes are bigger than last year, a positive sign. Public preschool is up 2.7%, and kindergarten up 1.3%. Hanging on to those families, by convincing them to keep going in public schools, is critical.

The good news isn’t universal. Poor Garfield High School, once the jewel of the Seattle high school system, is taking more blows. Its enrollment dropped by 150 from last year — down 9.3%. The entering freshman class is down 20%. The district’s decision to start ending accelerated tracks that fed into Garfield, combined with two shootings outside the school last spring, have taken infuriatingly predictable tolls.

My plea with school leaders, along with city and state officials, is to use this upside surprise to recalibrate. Mount a positive campaign for the schools. Don’t cut the learning options offered; attract more students back by expanding them. Give the people what they want, don’t come at them with a dire story.

Because the story isn’t that dire. Yes, there are budget gaps to be bridged. But getting hundreds more students than expected is like manna from heaven. It could make solving the district’s financial problems a bit easier, as it means more money from the state than projected. But it ought to make solving the district’s PR problems a lot easier.

You can take the good news to the Statehouse in Olympia and say: “We are a stable school district. The people have spoken. (Now give us some money).”

I’m not saying the enrollment surprise means zero schools should be closed. But it sure ought to change the conversation.

One of the enrollment consultants, William Kendrick, suggested in his report that the pandemic and its aftereffects had made the forecasting business trickier than usual.

“Births should be higher, but they continue to trend lower,” he wrote. “Have young people moved out? Have they stopped having kids and starting families? … Is this the new normal post-Covid?”

This is the thing, it seems, about everything. We still have no clue what the new normal post-COVID is going to be. Not with schools, mass transit, office work, the state of downtowns, or countless other institutions in American life. Nothing has fully recovered, or settled, yet.

So the bigger import of Seattle’s little October surprise is: Take a breath. Nobody knows anything. It is not the season to do anything rash.