U.S. school enrollment is at an all-time high. At 53.1 million students, current enrollment has even beat the record set in 1970 by the baby boomers. In just the past ten years, enrollment has increased by 14 percent.1
Across the nation, schools are struggling to meet the needs of growing student populations. In county after county, students must attend classes in portable classrooms and eat lunch in staggered schedules starting as early as 10:30 to ease the strain on crowded cafeterias. In some areas, sports leagues can’t find room for all the kids who want to participate. Teachers report that they don’t have enough time to assist individual students who need extra help, and too many students are getting lost in the crowd. Almost three out of four adolescents attend high schools larger than 1,000 students.
And at the same time that they are struggling to find more space and teachers, school systems must still meet basic educational challenges, like reducing dropout rates, raising academic achievement levels, increasing teacher effectiveness, and meeting the needs of an increasing share of non-English-speaking students. Yet rather than being used to improve the quality of education for current students, communities’ limited tax dollars must instead be diverted to build new schools to accommodate growth.
No Relief In Sight
By 2100, the nation’s schools will have to find room for 94 million students–nearly double the number of school-age children the nation has now.2
After remaining relatively stable between 2005 and 2010, the number of students is expected to increase steadily for the remainder of the century. Enrollment will reach 55 million by 2020 and 60 million by 2030.3
While enrollment increases will affect every sector of the country, western and southern states will experience the most dramatic growth. Public school enrollment in California, for example, will increase by 278,000 students in the next ten years. Enrollments in Texas will rise by 219,000. In addition, many smaller states also anticipate major jumps in enrollment: Idaho (14 percent); New Mexico (12 percent); Nevada (12 percent); and Alaska (10 percent).4
“These coming generations of children will require many more public resources, including a major investment in the construction, modernization and renovation of school facilities, many of which are already overcrowded and in disrepair,” warns the Department of Education.5 Nationwide, more than 2 million new teachers will need to be hired in the next decade.6
Overcrowding at Crisis Levels
The coming student population explosion poses daunting challenges for schools already overwhelmed by classroom crowding and teacher shortages.
Education researchers agree that ideal enrollments are no more than 300 students for an elementary school, no more than 500 for a middle school, and 600 to 900 for a high school.8 Yet already, 71 percent of all U.S. high school students go to schools larger than 1,000 students.9
High schools with 3,000 or more students are now common in large cities such as Los Angeles and New York. Some schools have as many as 5,000 students.10
About 14 percent of schools exceed their capacity by six to 25 percent, and eight percent exceed it by more than 25 percent.11
Smaller schools have measurably higher attendance rates, lower drop-out rates, less violence, less student alcohol and drug abuse, and higher grades and test scores.12 13 14 Small schools have been shown to be particularly helpful to inner-city students, especially African-American and Latino students and students from low-income families.15
Yet population growth makes putting smaller schools into practice virtually impossible. “Would (smaller schools) make sense instructionally? Would everybody love it? Sure,” said one assistant school superintendent. “Then you look at the demands of the rising population and the demands of space. Frankly, where do you put schools?”16
(Faced with just that dilemma, school districts nationwide are building schools on or near polluted and toxic sites, reports the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice. )17
To alleviate overcrowding, 36 percent of schools use portable classrooms, and one-fifth hold classes in temporary instructional space, such as cafeterias and gyms.18
In Georgia, a recent law requires schools to cut the class sizes over the next few years, but principals report that they simply don’t have the space to do it. There are too many students for the available classrooms. More than 14,900 new classrooms are needed.
In Florida, schools are so overcrowded that legislators are considering paying students to go to private schools instead of public ones.
In Mesa, Arizona, schools have even run out of room for classroom trailers, so 700 elementary school students attend classes in an old grocery store. “Our population is just booming, and we needed to get kids in classrooms,” says the school district’s construction director. The district already has 550 trailers and is building two schools a year to accommodate its enrollment increase of 1,000 new students every year. Officials are considering using an old strip mall and a vacant semiconductor manufacturing plant to house more students.19
In Raleigh, N.C., 1,200 middle school students attend classes in a converted manufacturing facility that used to make medical supplies.
In Warrensville Heights, Ohio, some kindergartners have storefront classrooms in an old shopping center across the street from a racetrack.
Students in one Kansas City school attend class in what used to be the boys’ bathroom.20
In Prince William County, Virginia, one high school’s hallways are so crowded that it now has traffic lanes. The county adds another 1,500 new students each year.21
Every three days, the Elk Grove, California school system gets enough new students to fill a high school classroom.22
The Los Angeles school district, the second largest in the country, projects a shortfall of 85,900 desks within the next six years when enrollments are expected to rise from 711,000 students in 2000 to about 750,000 students by 2005. Already in some classrooms, there are twice as many children as there are desks.23 School officials predict they will have to build 100 new schools in the next 10 years and need to hire an additional 4,000 teachers every year through at least 2005.24
Enrollment in Miami-Dade County increased by 32 percent between 1988 and 1998, adding 84,550 students to the rolls. According to Miami-Dade officials, 41 percent of their schools are at least 150 percent over capacity, and 84,000 students attend school in portable classrooms. The school system has to build one elementary school a month just to keep up with the influx of new immigrants.25
In the last 10 years, Las Vegas, Nevada, has seen its school enrollment double from some 100,000 students to more than 200,000, making the Clark County School District the 8th largest school district in the country. About 18,300 young children will enter first grade there in the coming year, the largest number of students enrolled in any grade.26 The school population in Las Vegas is slated to continue its rapid increase in the coming decade, requiring the city to build new schools for an additional 150,000 students by 2010.27
Sources of Growth
Demographers attribute much of the student population growth to immigration during the 1990s, as well as to population momentum from the baby boom.30
Immigration: The U.S. Census Bureau labels immigration “an important contributor” to school population increases. One in five students had at least one foreign-born parent,31 and almost one in every eight U.S. residents between ages ten and 19 were born in another country themselves.32
Particularly hard hit are schools in cities that serve as a gateway for new immigrants; school overcrowding in Houston, Chicago, New York, and Miami has reached a crisis point.33 According to the Washington Post, the student population explosion in Los Angeles is caused almost entirely by immigration—“both by recent arrivals who have been here for a while and are now having children, and by new immigrants who continue to pour into the city, bringing children with them.”34 Throughout California, half of all schoolchildren are either foreign-born or children of foreign-born parents.35
Fertility: The Census Bureau reports: “Much of the growth in the number of children enrolled in school today is driven by the number of babies born during the prior 5-to18-year period … (The increase in births during that period) was driven in part by the demographic momentum of the population, that is, a large number of women who were born during the baby-boom and who are now in their prime childbearing ages having births … In addition, the increase in births was influenced by the rise in the total fertility rate from 1.8 to 2.0 births per woman.”36
Impact Fees: Aid for Communities Overwhelmed by Population Growth
Impact fees—tying permission for new development to the costs of the new water, sewer, and road systems that would be required by the growth—are an increasingly popular way for local governments to control or fund the costs of population growth. About a dozen states specifically allow impact fees for building and expanding public schools.37
In Prince William County, Virginia, a commission proposed banning new residential development when school enrollment is 105 percent of capacity.38 County planners calculate that by limiting the number of houses built (and thus the population), the plan would save the district from having to build as many as 22 new schools (at a cost of $360 million).39 School analysts calculate that every new house brings an average of one child and $15,000 in school building costs with it, as well as money needed to pay teachers and run the schools once they’re built.40
In Calvert County, Maryland, regulations halt development when an area’s high schools have “inadequate” capacity. The rules were prompted by the county’s struggle to meet the cost of building new schools to absorb the constantly growing student population.41
Charles County, Maryland raised its home building fees to generate more money for schools struggling to keep pace with population growth. The fees were spurred by a report estimating the average cost that a new unit in each housing type represents for local schools.
If the federal government does not address population growth at the national level, using aggressive tools such as impact fees could become the only recourse for communities overwhelmed by population growth.