Reply #28: There's also a population age shift, the elephant in the room.. [View All]

[Xithras]

Where I live, they're closing schools left and right. Not just because of budget cuts, but because of a HUGE decline in enrollment across the board.

From the late 1980's, peaking in 1990, and tailing off by about 1993, the U.S. experienced what demographers sometimes call the late Echo Boom, but what was really the peak of the Gen Y baby boom that started around 1980 (for some reason, the boom started slowly, and then spiked from the late 80's to the early 90's). Following the end of the echo boom in 1994-ish, birthrates fell nationwide and remained down ever since (except for a brief spike in 1999-2000 when hundreds of thousands of people really did try to have "millenium babies").

The first babies born in this boomlet started exiting the public school system in 2003, and the babies born at the 1991 peak graduated in 2008. The remaining boomlet kids are rapidly graduating out of the public school system, and ALL of them who are still in the schools are now in high school and will graduate out within the next few years. By 2013, they will be out of the schools, and the overall number of schoolchildren nationwide will have dropped by something like 15-17% from its peak in 2003 (a nationwide reduction of something like 18 million students, IIRC). That's 17% less schools needed. 17% less teachers needed, 17% less buses needed, etc. On a national scale that work out to HUNDREDS of schools and TENS of THOUSANDS of teachers, staffers, and bus drivers that simply aren't needed anymore.

Based on current national population growth rates, we'll be back at the previous child population levels in another 10-15 years, and we'll rapidly exceed it once the boomlet kids start having children of their own en masse, but in the meantime we're in the initial phases of a nationwide lull in our school age population. Because most states fund schools based on enrollment, this is hitting the public school systems hard.