Even with Wake County school enrollment down, these 25 could be capped next year
The Wake County school system is in a period of declining growth, but it could still put enrollment caps on 25 schools for next school year.
Wake County’s average daily membership dropped this school year to 158,412 students instead of increasing as had been previously projected. Updated long-range enrollment projections presented on Wednesday have the number of students in the district continuing to trend downward before being projected to increase in 2026.
At the same time, administrators also recommended on Wednesday placing enrollment caps on 25 schools for the 2023-24 school year.
Wednesday’s presentations come as North Carolina’s largest school district deals with an uncertain future. The district isn’t sure how many of the thousands of students who left during the pandemic will ever return.
“We are still not back to pre-pandemic patterns,” Carolina Demography, part of the Carolina Population Center at UNC-Chapel Hill, wrote in its report to the school district. “It is hard to say if we are reaching a ‘new normal,’ or if we will ever get back to entirely pre-pandemic levels.”
Fewer students since pandemic
Wake County had its highest total of 161,907 students in the 2019-20 school year. But traditional public school enrollment plummeted nationwide during the pandemic, when more students opted instead for homeschooling, private schools and charter schools.
This school year, enrollment went up in 70 of North Carolina’s 115 school districts compared to last year. Wake wasn’t one of them. The number of students in Wake dropped between 348 and 654 pupils this school year, depending on which figures you use.
Wake is now nearly 3,500 students below pre-pandemic levels. The number of students matters because it determines how much funding is provided.
“In any year there are challenges making projections, but the past three years have been particularly challenging due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” Marcella Rorie, the district’s senior director for Long Range Planning, told the school board’s facilities committee on Wednesday.
Wake’s declining market share
Wake has been particularly hard hit by the expansion of school choice options. The percentage of Wake County students attending district schools has dropped from 82.5% in the 2013-14 school year to 75.7% last school year.
This year’s drop in the school district’s numbers come as charter schools added 1,147 more students. Figures for private schools and homeschooling won’t be available until the summer.
But planners project that rising birth rates will help the district add 7,187 students over the next decade. The model has Wake returning to to its pre-pandemic enrollment level in 2030.
These long-range projections are used to help plan budgets and construction program needs.
“Continued investments in school construction, facilities improvements and programmatic enhancements remain vital to attracting over 75% of our families” Rorie said.
List of capped schools
Despite the overall decline in the number of students, there are still pockets of extreme crowding. Wake’s response is to use enrollment caps, which shift the burden of reducing school overcrowding onto newcomers.
When a capped school reaches an enrollment limit, families who weren’t living in the attendance area by a certain date are assigned to a more distant school that has space. This school year, 837 students are capped out of the school they’d normally attend.
Capping is not popular for many families and forces Wake to run additional buses at a time of extreme driver shortages.
”We’ve exhausted every option for maintaining those students at those buildings,” Rorie said.
There are 25 schools capped for this school year. Administrators want to keep the cap at 24 schools and add a new one at Apex Friendship Elementary School while dropping the cap at Sycamore Creek Elementary in Raleigh.
Apex Friendship Elementary is a new school that opened in August. But Rorie said that the school is already seeing significant crowding and can’t add trailers to the campus.
Caps are recommended to continue at 19 elementary schools: Abbotts Creek, Alston Ridge, Apex, Beaverdam, Cedar Fork, Highcroft, Holly Grove, Holly Ridge, Hortons Creek, Mills Park, Northwoods, Oakview, Olive Chapel, Parkside, River Bend, Rogers Lane, Scotts Ridge, Weatherstone and White Oak.
Caps also are recommended to continue at Apex Friendship and Mills Park middle schools and Apex Friendship, Heritage and Panther Creek high schools.
School board chair Lindsay Mahaffey said Wake is still reeling from the impact of the state law that reduced K-3 class sizes.
The board could approve the capping recommendations on Feb. 21.
This story was originally published February 16, 2023 at 8:00 AM with the headline "Even with Wake County school enrollment down, these 25 could be capped next year."
