Public schools grapple with enrollment decline

Having fewer students spawns budget and staffing issues.

By EMBER DUKE
TribLive

There have been fewer than 100 kindergarten students in the Burrell School District for the last three years — a 23% decline from about 10 years ago.

“When it’s a three-year trend — and now we’re heading into a fourth year with it — then we know it’s probably linked to the public population decline,” Superintendent Shannon Wagner said.

Declining enrollment in traditional public schools is a trend that’s been growing nationally for decades, but what’s happening to all those missing students is not so easy to determine, said Pittsburgh Public Schools Chief Accountability Officer Theodore Dwyer.

But he does know there isn’t just one cause.

“It’s demographics, it’s housing patterns, it’s family mobility, it’s school choice, it’s charter and cyber charter enrollment, it’s private school enrollment, it’s homeschooling, it’s immigration, it’s neighborhood change, it’s normal life events. It’s all of those things in one,” Dwyer said.

Regardless of why public schools have fewer students, district’s are still left feeling the effects in classrooms and in their budgets.

Enrollment and daily operations

For many districts, fewer students means fewer teachers.

Matthew Mols, superintendent at Ligonier Valley School District, said eliminating positions through attrition and shifting teacher grade levels is the best way for districts to cope with shrinking class sizes.

For the upcoming school year, Ligonier Valley eliminated five teaching positions.

“That’s not always comfortable,” Mols said. “We’d rather use attrition than do anything else, though.”

Similarly, Burrell last year chose not to replace a kindergarten- through-second grade teacher, leaving the district with five homeroom classes for the grade levels instead of six, Wagner said.

This school year, it will be doing the same with third and fourth grades. Those changes will mean teachers will be handling more than one subject rather than students going to a different classroom for each subject, which is how the district functioned before, Wagner said.

“As the numbers shrink, we get less money to support the kids, which makes sense,” Wagner said. “But, at the same time, everything has to adapt and shift to make those accommodations.”

Greensburg Salem has become increasingly intentional in its decisions surrounding staffing, course offerings, scheduling, transportation and student resources in light of a nearly 8% decline in enrollment from 2019 to 2025, said Assistant Superintendent Kara Gardner.

That intentionality was reflected during Wednesday’s board meeting, when district officials announced they would not rehire for six vacant staff positions — five teachers and one administrator — and eliminate its coordinator of technology integration position.

“The district’s focus has been less about reducing opportunities and more about maximizing efficiency while continuing to invest in student achievement and growth,” Gardner said via email.

Finding a “sweet spot” of what programs to offer with available resources is key to handling declining enrollment, Mols.

Looking at Pennsylvania Department of Education enrollment projections, Ligonier Valley seems to be leveling out, Mols said.

“The numbers for the next five to 10 years look pretty stagnant,” Mols said. “That’s the silver lining.”

With fewer students filling school buildings, yet overhead costs still needing to be covered, districts must decide whether to close schools or consolidate buildings, said Andrew Christ, senior director of education policy at the Pennsylvania School Boards Association.

That’s what happened with Burrell. Citing declining enrollment, the district in 2025 closed Stewart Elementary School and consolidated students into nearby Bon Air Elementary.

Similarly, the Pittsburgh Public Schools board voted in May to close nine buildings and realign many others, in part, because of declining enrollment.

“We’re going to have to build new rituals and routines at some of the schools, and some schools aren’t going to be there anymore,” Dwyer said. “I feel like doing this actually does put students first and it also puts us in a mindset where all of us are here to help the kids … I’ve seen closures and reorganizations happen in other districts and the way that we’ve approached this here is so much better than anywhere else I’ve seen.”

Sometimes, declining enrollment is a short-term win for taxpayers.

Penn-Trafford School District, for example, was able to trim a mill from the tax increase it passed for the coming school year because a small decline in enrollment over the past four years meant the district had to replace only one of five elementary teaching positions opened because of retirements, said Superintendent Matthew Harris.

But don’t think that means Harris isn’t concerned by enrollment declines.

While the declines have been small and not a huge blow to the district, they’re still adding up.

“It does takes it’s toll after a few years,” Harris said. “The bigger classes that are graduating aren’t being matched by the kindergarten classes coming in.”

Numbers not encouraging

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data from 2019 to 2025 shows many districts in Southwestern Pennsylvania have declining enrollment, but the severity of the decline varies.

Kiski Area School District saw an 8.5% enrollment decline through those years while neighboring Leechburg Area School District’s enrollment dropped 13.7%, according to NCES data.

Even the relatively more affluent Franklin Regional School District lost about 2% of its students in the same time.

The largest district in the region, Pittsburgh Public Schools, has watched its enrollment plunge almost 23% in just 10 years since the 2015-16 school year, according to the district’s 2025-26 academic year enrollment analysis.

Cyber schools take a bite

In Pennsylvania, cyber charter schools are growing in popularity as an alternative to traditional public schools.

According to the 2026 Pennsylvania School Board Association State of Education report, about 64,300 students are enrolled in cyber charter schools, compared to about 1.5 million enrolled in traditional public schools.

But cyber charter students are not off public school districts’ books. State law requires public school districts to pay the tuition of students enrolled in cyber charter schools but physically living in the public school’s footprint, essentially forcing public school to pay to educate students who not in their schools.

The situation sparked many public schools to start their own online academies to keep students who want a remote learning experience counting toward the district’s enrollment and to diminish the bite of cyber charter schools.

“We can support a kid with classes for around $3,000 with (Burrell e-Academy),” Burrell’s Wagner said. “When a child goes to a public cyber charter school, we spend about $14,000.”

Timothy Eller, chief branding and government relations officer for Commonwealth Charter Academy, said he thinks public school districts are inflating how paying for cyber charter affects them.

“On a statewide average, it makes up 3% of (public districts’) budget,” Eller said. “That’s not to say that it doesn’t cost to educate these children, but we’ve got to keep in perspective that families that send their children to cyber charter schools are taxpayers under Pennsylvania law. They have a right to send their child to a different public school, and that’s what families are doing.”

Commonwealth Charter Academy, which has about 40,000 students, has enrolled 30,000 of those students in just the past six years in the wake of the covid pandemic, Eller said.

He said the reason many of those students remained in cyber charter school after the pandemic is multifaceted, but could be because parents wanted to be more involved in student learning and didn’t like public school’s curriculum once they saw how it was taught online during the pandemic.

Bringing 12 cyber and charter school students back into the district helped Greensburg Salem realize about $145,000 in savings while drafting its 2026-27 budget. Superintendent Ken Bissell said during the Wednesday school board meeting.

To draw cyber and charter students into district classrooms, Greensburg Salem has worked to strengthen its academic performance and build community partnerships, Gardner said.

“Rather than viewing enrollment solely as a recruitment issue,” she said, “Greensburg Salem’s focus is on creating conditions that make families choose to stay and prospective families choose to enroll.”

Creating budget problems

Though not a new trend, declining enrollment can put a strain on district budgets partly because of changing state policies, said Andrew Christ, senior director of education policy at the Pennsylvania School Boards Association.

From 1992 to 2016, the state dispersed public school money according to a “hold-harmless” policy, meaning districts couldn’t be allocated less state funding for an academic year than they got the previous year.

In 2016, the state changed to a “fair funding” formula for basic education, the lion’s share of state funding that does not include things like special education funding, which is determined separately.

Under fair funding, the state allots a total amount for schools statewide. It then determines how much each district gets based on things like enrollment, property tax base and average income within the district.

For some districts, fewer students means less state funding, Christ said.

Greensburg Salem has had to absorb the financial impact of losing about 200 students in five years, Gardner said.

“Many operational expenses — facilities, transportation, utilities, contractual obligations, special education services and staffing — do not decline at the same pace as student enrollment,” she said.

State funding for public schools is determined by something called “average daily membership” and not strictly enrollment, said Casey Smith, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

Average daily membership accounts for all students living in the district that the district is financially responsible for, meaning the number could include cyber or private school students, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Education website. Enrollment is only the number of students educated in district buildings.

“This distinction is important as it would include students educated in their home school district as well as any resident enrolled in another public school entity such as charter schools, cyber charter schools, approved private schools, and career and technical centers,” Smith said.

Even that, sometimes, amounts to an educated guess.

Dwyer of Pittsburgh Public Schools said the state and federal governments look at school district membership levels just once a year, in October, to determine funding levels for the next school year. While the numbers are adjusted, allowing for a bit of room to plan in the classroom, Dwyer said school enrollments often change before the new school year begins.

“We use October membership as a snapshot and we know it’s a snapshot,” Dwyer said. “We also know that some schools are going to have more mobility most of the time.”

Mols, the Ligonier Valley superintendent, said fixing the issue requires finding the root cause of students leaving public schools in the first place, where they are going and how to retain them.

“I want our (state and local) representatives to partner with school districts to find ways to grow,” Mols said.