New Hampshire School Enrollment Drops; Pandemic Part Of The Cause

CONCORD, NH — A profound nationwide drop in public school enrollment could have lasting effects in New Hampshire — which could extend far beyond the pandemic.

A new analysis conducted by The Associated Press and Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news organization covering education, shows student enrollment dropped in nearly every U.S. state, including New Hampshire last year. Hawaii was the lone exception, where enrollment increased by a meager 0.2 percent. The pandemic is the likely culprit behind the sharp declines, according to The AP analysis.

When schools moved online during the pandemic, many parents opted to send their kids elsewhere. While some pulled children out of public schools to home-school them, others enrolled their kids in private schools since many continued to offer in-person instruction.

Now, some school officials are worried those students may never return, The AP reported. If they don’t, it’s a shift that could not only affect district funding but also change the demographics of America’s schools.

In New Hampshire, total student enrollment in grades K-12 dropped from 193,519 students in 2019-20 to 192,003 in 2020-21, about a 1 percent decrease.

The biggest decrease was among economically disadvantaged students, where enrollment numbers fell by nearly 17.6 percent

But in New Hampshire’s case, the data in the report is skewed, mostly due to free lunches for all students during the pandemic. Qualifications for free and reduced lunch is how the state counts its “economically disadvantaged” student population. If a student qualifies, at the federal level, they are put into that category. School districts with students in that category also receive more adequacy aid from the state. To qualify, parents have to file income forms.

Since students were given free food during the pandemic, thousands of parents across the state had “no urgency to actually complete the application and qualify for the F&R,” said Frank Edelblut, the commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Education. This left school districts scrambling to have parents fill out the forms since state education aid is based on the qualifications. It is also why the AP study data, which shows economically disadvantaged students dropping in enrollments by nearly 20 percent, is partially off because New Hampshire is not seeing this data drop. Students in the category, Edelblut said, “may have gone up.”

The graying of New Hampshire is something officials, including Edelblut, have been speaking about a lot, before and after he became commissioner.

“It is true that the in-bound migration to NH could slow the trend somewhat, but many other states are in a similar situation,” he said. “The national and global demographics are what is driving this.”

Edelblut added that higher education, too, will be taking a hit due to this drop, with potentially higher tuition rates and lower enrollments, into the 2030s.

Here’s a look at how enrollment changed among other groups in New Hampshire:

• Black students: -2.5 percent
• Hispanic students: 0.34 percent
• Asian American students: -4.94 percent
• White students: -5.38 percent
• Economically disadvantaged students: -17.6 percent
• Non-economically disadvantaged students: 0.57 percent

Kathleen Murphy, Concord’s school superintendent, the third-largest SAU in the state, said part of the reason, too, for the economically disadvantaged drop was the overall economy growing before the pandemic. That “uptick in people doing better, economically, I saw it in Hampton, too.” But the free and reduced lunch forms have been a problem in Concord and Nashua with the districts scrambling to get them filled to not lose millions of dollars in funding.

“We don’t know the numbers because everybody got lunch,” she said. “This year was tough.”

There has also been migration in Concord and the state, mostly around housing, a situation where a lot of residents cannot afford how high the rents have become, there are nearly no vacancies, and new housing production has been limited. In Hampton, Murphy saw that transition, too, where, after the summer rental season, different populations of people who could not afford to rent at the beach could afford to the off-season and were popping up into the school district.

There are also not as many births in New Hampshire or the nation, she added.

“We’re older,” Murphy said. “New Hampshire is a lot older than other states.”

What also makes the enrollment issues difficult is that when a district loses students, they don’t lose a whole class; they lose a student here, a student there. Meaning the opportunity for savings is limited. A teacher, she said, may have one or two fewer students in a class, but with 25 or 30 students in a class, a district cannot cut a teacher if their class drops from 30 to 28. Attrition does help, Murphy said, with younger teachers being brought in at lower pay scales. It is all about scale.

“You have to do those things,” Murphy said. “You have to watch the costs. It is all about balance. There is no question in my mind that public education and our schools weave our communities together. The school community is important. (But) we need to change; we need to improve; we need to do a lot of things.”

Another factor during the pandemic was parents pulling their students out of public schools, especially when some, like Concord, were fully remote when there were few cases of coronavirus.

Nashua, too, had a revolt of parents who wanted their children in the classroom, and the city's board of education and then-Superintendent Jahmal Mosley refused to reopen the schools, even when infection rates were limited. One school board member even used racial comments to attack the women who were organizing to reopen schools, failing to see there was a diversity of families who wanted their children back in school for both economic and psychological reasons.

Kate Baker Demers, the executive director of the Children's Scholarship Fund in New Hampshire, offers scholarships to parents who move their students from public schools to home-schooling, public charter schools, and religious schools, many, which stayed open during the pandemic and had very few issues with coronavirus.

For the 2020-2021 school year, 626 students received scholarships from the organization to attend an alternative school — with more than $1.3 million being donated. That has grown from 120 and about $221,000 five school years ago. And the need, for more money for scholarships, is there — there is a long waiting list.

“There were 800 kids I couldn’t help,” she said.

Every family receiving a scholarship is economically disadvantaged. During the pandemic, for people who had to work outside of the home, it was the job or partially home-schooling the student, especially in districts that were fully remote.

“I had so many calls from people who could not work at home,” she said. “LNAs, delivery drivers, grocery store workers … they had children who were the most impacted and they did not know what to do.”

The pandemic, Demers said, showed the true disparity in education in New Hampshire — it is by zip code. Demers said if districts, communities, and the state, did not draw lines, creating the socioeconomic divide, there would not be education discrimination against families and maybe, there would not be such a decline that is sometimes found between communities.

“You’re trapped,” she said. “You’re trapped by socioeconomics, towns, with lines drawn of where you can and cannot go. You have to leave if you are unhappy and have nowhere else to go.”

While it may be a “tiny impact,” she said, those vulnerable students were the ones who were able to succeed in alternative environments. Demers has hundreds of turnaround stories of students being able to perform better for themselves in different settings.

But it was not just the pandemic: Families have been coming to the organization due to bullying, discrimination, lack of child safety, as well as students falling below grade level. Demers also hoped, at some point, the state would re-think education in general. The Education Freedom Accounts bill, she said, where funds can be used to pay for all the things families could not get from their assigned public school during the pandemic, might force that or lead to changes, too.

“Regular, working people have nowhere for their kids to go,” Demers said. “It makes sense. The money belongs to the children; it doesn’t belong to the building.”

Nationwide, enrollment in preschool to 12th grade dropped by 2.6 percent across 41 states last fall, according to the analysis done by The AP and Chalkbeat.

The decline was steepest among white students, whose enrollment fell more than 4 percent.

Early signs show enrollment may not fully recover, according to The AP’s report. A sustained drop in enrollment could mean two things.

First, schools that lose students will eventually lose funding for those students.

Generally, public schools are funded on a per-student basis through federal, state, and local sources. Half or more of those funds come from local property taxes nationally. Fewer students could mean an increase in property taxes to make up for the decrease in per-student funding.

A dip in enrollment is also likely to hit the wallet of poorer districts harder, Bruce Baker, an education professor at Rutgers University, told National Public Radio.

"If you've got a district where 70, 80 percent of the money is coming in state aid based on some enrollment count number, which would tend to be a poorer district serving a higher share of low-income and minority students," Baker said, "those districts stand to lose a lot if the state decides to follow through with using this year's enrollment counts as a basis for funding in the future."

An October 2020 report by NPR showed enrollment drops are especially noticeable in kindergarten and pre-K — the average drop was about 16 percent. Another analysis of 33 states showed that roughly 30 percent of all K-12 enrollment declines were attributable to kindergarten.

The AP and Chalkbeat’s report also corroborated this. In New Hampshire, kindergarten enrollment dropped by 41 students or about 0.33 percent.

Nationwide, no state avoided a decrease in kindergarten enrollment. Some of the largest drops were reported in other states including Hawaii, where kindergarten enrollment dropped by more than 15 percent, and Oregon, where enrollment dropped more than 14.5 percent.

Parents are instead opting to send their young children to charter schools or daycare centers. As more kids go without the academic and other benefits of kindergarten, experts say, it could potentially widen educational inequities

“It all has to do with the quality of that care setting,” Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal, a University of Pittsburgh professor who studies child care and early education, told Chalkbeat. “Affluent parents can buy their way into high-quality settings, regardless of the constraints that they face, whereas families that have fewer resources have fewer choices and face very tough decisions.”

Editor's note: I was director of communications for the New Hampshire Department of Education between April 13, 2018, and April 16, 2019.

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