Construction is underway for a brand new Newton-Conover High School. To Superintendent Aron Gabriel, the rising cinder block that will become a spacious new school is a sign of optimism.
"If you build it, they will come," Gabriel said with a grin.
Gabriel is proud of this school, just like he's proud of Newton-Conover City Schools' high graduation rate and solid state test scores.
"I do think it sells itself, but we just have to figure out how to get people to follow and then more people to have babies and bring them here," Gabriel chuckled.
In the five years that it took to plan and construct this school, student enrollment in the district has taken a sharp downturn. Now this school that was, in part, meant to address overcrowding in the county, isn't likely to be crowded.
Newton-Conover City Schools is small, with just two high schools, and enrollment has dropped 11% in five years 鈥� one of the largest declines in the state, to the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction each fall.
"When you look at the pandemic coupled with lower incoming kids in kindergarten, still, it doesn't account for the amount of drop," Gabriel said.
Public school enrollment fell nationwide during the pandemic, as more families turned to homeschooling or private schools for reasons ranging from health concerns to difficulty with remote learning.
Five years later, 101 of 115 public school districts in North Carolina still have fewer students than they did before the pandemic. Falling public school enrollment now appears here to stay, but school choice isn't the only reason why.
Gabriel says there are a couple private schools in the area, but no charter schools within his district. The furniture industry in Catawba County has waned over time, but it's not like a factory recently closed or a housing development disappeared. There's just been a steady decline of children, especially at the elementary schools.
Gabriel ends his day in the car pickup line at South Newton Elementary, where the incoming kindergarten class has fallen by dozens of students in recent years. That worries Gabriel, because it affects the district's bottom line.
"The way our funding flows is per kid, and as the per kid numbers go down, so does our funding," Gabriel explained.
In public schools, funding by and large pays for educators. Gabriel says he hasn't yet had to let go of teachers, but he has cut central office jobs, so some staff are now doing the work of three or more people.
Gabriel has actually come to the elementary school this afternoon to talk to staff about potential cuts next year.
"Big picture, it impacts kids and the opportunities they have and the supports they have," Gabriel said.
Gabriel is worried that funding cuts will affect the students who are still here, but he still doesn't understand how to change the tide.
"I'm still scratching my head," Gabriel said. "That's the one thing that I want to impact, but I can't control it."
The three factors that affect school enrollment: births, migration and school choice
Gabriel can't decipher what's happening, but there's one person in the state whose job it is to study these trends. Nathan Dollar, the director of Carolina Demography at UNC-Chapel Hill, and his staff calculate enrollment projections for every school district in the state for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. In many school districts, those projections are all that superintendents and school boards have to base their decisions on.
Carolina Demography examines three main factors that affect enrollment: births, migration and market share. Dollar says for any school district, he looks at all three, starting with births.
"So, fertility is on the decline everywhere," Dollar said. "The United States fell below replacement level fertility during the Great Recession, and we've been consistently below replacement fertility ever since."
Replacement level fertility is 2.1 births per woman, which is the rate needed for a population to remain constant. In 2023, the most recent year for which , the U.S. birth rate fell to 1.6 births per woman.
Dollar says North Carolina's rate largely tracks with the U.S. birth rate, which had been falling for a decade before it took a nosedive with the pandemic.
North Carolina is still gaining population, but it's because people are moving here from other states. That in a handful of counties.
"It absolutely depends on where you are," Dollar said. "Most of the people that are moving to North Carolina are moving to our urban centers, mostly moving for purposes of work, and they're in those prime working ages, so they're the most likely to have children."
That's the one factor that's driving growth in places like Wake County. However, even Wake County Schools' enrollment has remained flat since the pandemic.
Then the last factor Dollar looks at is what he calls market share 鈥� students leaving a particular school district to go to homeschools, charter schools or private schools. Traditional public schools now serve about three-quarters of K-12 students in North Carolina.
Homeschooling surged during the pandemic, and has since fallen, but it's still above pre-pandemic levels. Charter school enrollment has grown steadily in North Carolina for the past 20 years. Private school enrollment trends are a big question for many school districts as the state has recently expanded public funding for private school vouchers.
Dollar said his team would like to conduct an analysis of how voucher expansion in North Carolina is affecting public school enrollment, but he said the data needed to do this is not currently available.
Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools has lost 1,000 students since 2020. Is housing a factor?
Sometimes school administrators know their district's enrollment is down, but they don't know why. That's often when school boards call Carolina Demography.
"They're wanting to understand declining enrollment. What's happening? Why are we losing so many students year over year?" Dollar explained. "Then we walk through our usual suspects."
A few months ago, Dollar gave a presentation to the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City school board. In five years, the school district has lost about 1,000 students.
"Really since COVID, is when we started to notice a really notable decline in enrollment," said longtime school board member Rani Dasi.
After conducting an evaluation, what Dollar found is that despite being in an urban area with plenty of jobs, Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools was losing students due to the birth rate, school choice, and families moving away.
Dollar says it was no surprise to find a low birth rate in the district because that's often associated with a highly educated community. As for market share, the school board has known the district is losing students to charter schools and a growing private school nearby.
But Dollar says he was surprised to discover that families are also migrating out of what's widely regarded as one of the best public school districts in the state.
Dasi says the school board thinks this has something to do with housing trends.
"Housing values are so inflated," Dasi said. "That's had an impact on younger families' ability to find housing, but also being able to afford housing in the district."
Chapel Hill residents also pay higher property taxes for schools. The district has had a reputation of families choosing to buy homes there just to send their kids to public school. Now those families are disappearing.
Dasi says it's possible that more Baby Boomers are aging in place, and families looking for more elbow room might find it outside of Chapel Hill. There's very little undeveloped land left in the city's limits. Dasi thinks that could be driving families to new housing developments outside the school district's boundaries.
"You might have a house that has the same price in a different community, but it's a newer, more modern house," Dasi said.
All these factors are forcing school boards to think like demographers, economists, and fortune tellers.
"I wish we had more certainty about where students are going," Dasi said.
Dasi says this uncertainty puts school boards in a tight spot, because there aren't many tools at their disposal to act quickly when fewer kindergartners arrive every August.
"You can't quickly shut down schools or change staffing models," Dasi says. "But you can put some scenarios together that say, like, 'If enrollment continues to decline, here's a path we might start to take.'"
Those paths might need to include cutting positions at public schools, which in many parts of North Carolina are not only the largest educator of children, but also the biggest employer in town.
