Posted on 07/24/2012 5:16:46 PM PDT by markomalley
Enrollment in nearly half of the nation's largest school districts has dropped steadily over the last five years, triggering school closings that have destabilized neighborhoods, caused layoffs of essential staff and concerns in many cities that the students who remain are some of the neediest and most difficult to educate.
While the losses have been especially steep in long-battered cities like Cleveland and Detroit, enrollment has also fallen significantly in places suffering through the recent economic downturn, like Broward County, Fla., San Bernardino, Calif., and Tucson, according to the latest available data from the Department of Education, analyzed for The New York Times. Urban districts like Philadelphia and Columbus, Ohio, are facing an exodus even as the school-age population has increased.
Enrollment in the New York City schools, the largest district in the country, was flat from 2005 to 2010, but both Chicago and Los Angeles lost students, with declining birthrates and competition from charter schools cited as among the reasons.
Because school financing is often allocated on a per-pupil basis, plummeting enrollment can mean fewer teachers will be needed. But it can also affect the depth of a district's curriculum, jeopardizing programs in foreign languages, music or art.
(Excerpt) Read more at post-gazette.com ...
In the real world, such a strategic shift would simply mean investment in other verticals. Naturally, the public employee union answer is to increase the budget (particularly directed to planned abortionhood -- to stop the out of control birth rates...).
Dedicated parents sacrifice for their children’s future by putting them in Christian schools or home schooling them. These children are getting a superior education and learning how to live and how to die as children of God. What a fantastic gift that will last through eternity!
Public unions hardest hit
This is a good time to clean house and find out where all the corruption is, not only in the schools but in the cities and counties. Other cities and counties need to start looking at their finances NOW..........before things come tumbling down on them. Start asking questions and demand answers. If you don’t, you can’t complain.
They aint doing it right.
In Youngstown they have been building NEW Schools in areas that have declining enrollment.
Youse got to keep your construction buddies fat.
I interpret the drop-off in student numbers as illegal aliens self-deporting.
As employement opportunities dwindle, there is no reason to stay.
The idiocy in some school districts is offering Pre-K, now seeing declining enrollment as more unemployed parents keep the kids home until Kindergarten.
The first of the recession was 2007. Birth rates dropped off 2008. We’re now seeing a lower pre-K batch about to hit kindergarten. Many school districts are seeing a drop off just because of demographics, for those who have pre-K and realize the Kindergarten class next year will be smaller.
The big push should be for the abolition of Public Schools and the creation of true competition through a voucher system that follows the child.
Chesterton on birth control/population control: In 1925 Chesterton wrote an introduction to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in which he said that “The answer to anyone who talks about the surplus population is to ask him, whether he is part of the surplus population; or if not, how he knows he is not.”
But do they ever cut the number of administrators in the school system?
Obviously, no one ever taught these mensa candidates that a shortage of people ultimately will equate to a shortage of demand.
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