KIRKWOOD — Four years ago, Kirkwood School District leaders pushed for the construction of a new elementary school based on an expectation of increasing enrollment.
By the fall of 2023, enrollment was projected to reach 6,255 students according to campaign materials for Proposition S, the no-tax increase bond measure. The bond money would help build the new school planned for 13 acres of district land at Dougherty Ferry and Lindeman roads. If the proposition didn’t pass, school boundaries would need to be redrawn to ease overcrowding in some classrooms.
Voters turned down Proposition S in April 2020. The new school was never built, and the boundary changes were postponed during the pandemic.
This fall, enrollment in Kirkwood schools is 5,837, down 39 students from 2022-2023 and more than 400 short of the projection — around the size of an elementary school.
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Kirkwood's enrollment is now projected to drop to 5,400 in the next five years. It is no longer necessary to redraw boundaries for the district’s five elementary schools, Superintendent David Ulrich told the school board at its meeting Monday. By 2028-2029, all of the schools should be near the goal of 85% capacity.
“I was just as surprised as everybody else to see this,â€Â Ulrich said. “A couple of things that I want to say about that. We will follow where the data takes us. I trust that this board, if we learn new and different information, specifically if our projections go and turn around and start back in that direction ... they would want me to bring back and look at what our utilization in our elementary schools would be like.â€
The main cause for the downward trend is a long-term, widespread decline in birth rates, said , the district’s contracted demographer who gave a presentation at the meeting.
Falling birth rates have been a concern nationwide since the Great Recession in 2008. But Kirkwood was different, former superintendent Michele Condon said in 2020, because a number of families move into the district before starting kindergarten.
Now any real or perceived migration of children to Kirkwood seems to have stalled. Only the 412 ninth-grade class is smaller than the 414 kindergartners this year. Housing costs and land values in Kirkwood have “skyrocketed,†the demographer said.
“It’s becoming harder for younger families with kids to live in the district or to move here,†Kofron told the board. “Affordable housing is an issue.â€
The pace of bungalows being torn down to build large homes in Kirkwood also has slowed. And regardless, people who buy bigger houses don’t necessarily fill them with children, Kofron added.
“The number of affluent householders moving in, they acquire and they use more floor space, bigger houses, but they don’t tend to have more kids,†he told the board. “It’s the smaller houses that tend to produce more children which would add to the Kirkwood elementary enrollments.â€Â
Another factor in declining enrollment is the phase out of the desegregation program, which brought 200 students from ºüÀêÊÓƵ city to Kirkwood a decade ago, and is down to 38 students this year.
The rate of transfers from public schools to home schools or private schools has stabilized in Kirkwood and statewide since a spike in fall of 2020, the first school year of the pandemic. The number of students who left Kirkwood for private schools this year, 113, is the lowest of the last five years.
The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is expected to release statewide enrollment data next month. Preliminary figures from local school districts indicate the downward trend is also continuing elsewhere.
Webster Groves has dropped by nearly 300 students since fall of 2019. Valley Park is expected to lose more than 100 students in the next decade to around 630 total in kindergarten through high school. ºüÀêÊÓƵ Public Schools, once the largest in the state, shrunk by 7% in the last year to 18,430 students. A new charter school, , revised its budget after enrolling 50 fewer students than the projected 120.
With deaths exceeding births in Missouri for the third straight year in 2022, schools can expect more empty desks for the foreseeable future.