Speaker 1: Hamilton, thanks for being with us. What changes are you seeing?

Speaker 2: Thank you, Rich. It's good to talk with you. We've seen a pretty remarkable change when we look at school enrollment in Virginia, but really, in general, any sort of kindergarten, 12th grade school enrollment. During the 2010s, we had a lot of growth in school enrollment, generally in our bigger cities or bigger metro areas, areas with healthy economies. Then the trend, I think you've seen really around the country, when you looked at the biggest metro areas, we had most of the job growth. That's where young adults moved. That's where they started families. That's where they enrolled their children in school. Even before the pandemic, when we were forecasting out 2018, 2019 in Virginia, I think nationally, what we were seeing is signs that we're going to see school enrollment decline around the country. Definitely here in Virginia, areas that had seen decline already around the country, parts of Virginia were on course to start seeing a decline, largely because we had a drop in births in 2007 during the Great Recession, and that never came back. That's been one of the big trends in demography here in the U.S., but really, in most developed countries is this steady decline in birth rates that started around the financial crisis and really has just kept going since. You get to around 2013, 2014, you start seeing kindergarten class sizes shrinking, and that was one of the first big concrete indicators that we were going to see this change happen in school enrollment. Slowly, as these grades progress forward each year, you start seeing elementary school enrollment decline. By the time you get to the pandemic, Virginia's public school enrollment is still growing, but we were already forecasting within a couple of years it's going to slip into this long-term decline, really with no end in sight, which is already 2019. That was the main trend we were operating with before anybody talked about COVID-19. I think there are parts of the country that already had enrollment decline, but the same sort of wave was coming at them of births dropping after 2007 and having smaller and smaller class sizes. That's been an underlying trend, and it's still very much there, but the trend that's really affected schools across the country, definitely here in Virginia, was the pandemic. That's a different trend entirely, but it's had an impact, at least in Virginia, on the same scale in enrollment decline that we expected to see over the 2020s as a whole, about 3% or about 45,000 fewer students at the end of the decade than the start. We had that happen just within a year or two in our public schools, but what's, I think, been really notable about that is we didn't see many new students come back. A lot of people said, this is a one-off, classes come back to meet in person, we'll see enrollment bounce back. We've seen almost none of that. From the fall of 2022 to the last fall, 2023, we only had several hundred children missing from Virginia's public schools come back in. We have well over 40,000 fewer children in public schools. At the same time, though, we've seen really an explosion in enrollment in those children who are educated at home and also in private schools. That seems to have been one of the permanent results of the pandemic, was this huge loss in students in public school divisions, really, right across Virginia, not coming back. Then now, when we're looking at the rest of the decade, we still have these trends that were in place before the pandemic, which was long-term enrollment loss, just because births have been declining and declining, and they're still declining. I think those are, when you're looking at demographics and enrollments in Virginia, those are the two big underlying trends we've been operating with, say, the last five or so years. But there's a lot of interesting sub-trends, particularly thinking about private school and homeschool enrollment that were going on before the pandemic really accelerated during the pandemic.

Speaker 1: In this trend, are you seeing urban-rural trends being similar or different?

Speaker 2: Before the pandemic, we had a lot of those big urban-rural disparities that I think you saw around the country, growth being heavily concentrated in urban areas, a lot of decline in rural areas, very different economies. But back in January of 2020, we were doing a lot of research in my office. It'd been prompted by a conversation we had with the university's press office about what we thought might be the big demographic trend during the 2020s, and did a lot of research on that. In the end, the trend that jumped out to us, remember this is January 2020, was telecommuting. That was something other demographers were talking about before the pandemic. It was really taking off in the late 2010s. That's exploded during the pandemic. We've got about a third of all work being done remotely that hasn't gone anywhere the last couple of years. So with that, this huge amount of work being done remotely, we've seen a lot of families relocating to lower-cost areas. And so now the enrollment trends my office is forecasting for the rest of the decade here in Virginia are really very different from what we saw in the last couple of decades. We're expecting enrollment to decline in some of the wealthiest school divisions in Virginia, some of the big urban ones that used to be where all the growth was. At the same time, two of the three fastest-growing divisions we're expecting in the next five years are two of the smallest, extremely rural ones. They've lost half the population of the last half-century, but now they're expected to be the fastest-growing because of the number of families who've moved in since the pandemic. And that's a trend that doesn't seem to be going away. We have some numbers coming out next week that are the most recent population estimate ones for 2023. There's really no return to pre-COVID trends so far with that. So that's a really remarkable change from the past. There's a lot of uncertainty there, but it does seem coming out of 2020 that something's a non-return to normal. And one is when you look at migration trends, we're in a very, very different place we were just a few years ago.

Speaker 1: One of the conversations we had earlier, you speculated that with the migration to lower-cost areas by the telecommunity community is it might, might, might impact birth rates. Do you still hold to that thinking?

Speaker 2: Yeah. I think maybe a little further. So when we talked, since we talked, if I'm remembering this conversation, I think we've had at least one more year's worth of data that came up last couple of months ago. And what that's shown again is that a lot of these rural localities that had births declining 20, 30% over a couple of decades, resulting in school enrollment declining 20, 30% have seen those births stabilized and sometimes come back up a bit again from families coming in. It's one of the better indicators of the families coming in besides looking at public school enrollment. A lot of the families coming into these divisions aren't necessarily enrolling their children in public school, but many of them are. And I think that's what you're seeing in some of these smaller school divisions where now you have growth. But that does seem to be a trend we're seeing not in all, but I would say most rural counties. Virginia is a number of signs, including the births that we have families coming in, having more children. And so it's better for the communities as a whole. But I think it also, for a lot of these school divisions that have been way under capacity, it's something they very much welcome. As a side note, in Virginia, I think this is true in most states, public schools are heavily funded based off of a formula often factoring how many children are in the schools. When you get small enough, the economies of scale really become an issue. So a lot of these divisions are pretty desperate to have more children.

Speaker 1: What sort of questions are you getting from the policy makers that you all are interacting with?

Speaker 2: Well, my office produces several different data products that go into funding schools and for planning. And often the questions related to that. So we do an annual estimate of school age population that's used for allocating billions in sales tax revenue in schools. We do a population estimates for the total population of each division. That goes into a very complicated formula that provide most education funding schools. And then we also produce these forward forecasts, what we think is what will be in the future. That's really more planning based. So a lot of the times the questions are a couple of things. I think one is trying to understand how these enrollment changes might affect funding, might affect them for planning. If their enrollment is going down, trying to understand how that's going to affect money coming to the division. I think the changes we've seen since the pandemic though, it kind of generated a couple different conversations. One often from divisions is, should we be building another school or should we be closing a school? If things are changing this quickly, should we just put everything on pause? I remember I spoke to a division in Virginia that had, I think north of a billion dollars in planned projects, but things have changed so much. Their view is maybe just stop and wait. And it's remarkable because this division has, if they had every other year built a new high school, they would have been fine. They could have just done that automatically the last 50 years, but things have changed so much so quickly. They want to stop and watch this. Another kind of theme that's come up a bit is trying to understand the families moving into these divisions. Many of them are educating their children at home. A lot of they're using online tutors. And so for public schools, it's just something different off these rural school divisions where just about everybody in the community sent their kid to school. Often their parents have gone to that school, all of a sudden you have people whose parents didn't go to that school, completely unfamiliar with the school, didn't move there even thinking about the school. And, you know, is it, in some cases, can you just have the children come in for club activities? Could they come in for calculus? Trying to figure out how to serve them. And a lot of that's trying to understand who the parents are. And I think that's quite difficult. And a lot of the parents are working remotely, so they're not working in the community. So there can be really be a real disconnect there. That's something that's come up a lot since the pandemic. I think one other thing that comes up, I have a presentation next week to one of the state General Assembly finance committees is really taking more longer term. What happens if you've had progressively smaller class sizes? That means ultimately the number of graduates, high school graduates going down. What does it mean for colleges? What does it mean for the workforce? I think there's also these bigger implications and that circles back around to schools. If the workforce is shrinking, can you hire enough school bus drivers? Can you hire enough teachers? It comes a bit around, but that's, there's a role. I think a lot of the different themes have come up talking with school divisions, a lot of people in Richmond here in Virginia as well.

Speaker 1: I think what you're outlining is a time of uncertainty, but needing to be analytic in that and to be watching trends and asking what they mean. What do you think our listeners should, how should they be viewing your information and how should they use it?

Speaker 2: I think on one hand, I think it is important to understand the scale of uncertainty. People often seem to think every time it's uncertain, there's always some uncertainty, but definitely I've been doing this since 2010. The last few years have definitely been the most interesting and harder to predict. And I think it is important to understand how little is given. School work does seem to be sticking around. And that is the case that's the biggest sort of shift we've seen in demographic trends, I think in the country since probably World War II, suburbanization. There's a lot of implications. The shift to private school we've seen in homeschools, another big shift that is looking permanent. There's still uncertainty there. I think though, at the same time, there are some things that are fixed. I think one thing I understand is this decline in births. Even if you have a baby boom today, that's not going to affect public schools till the end of this decade. Some of those things are very much fixed in place. You can plan quite a bit based off of looking at the birth rates we've seen in our regions and our school divisions. You may have some people moving in and move out, but by and large, there are some certainties there. I think you can forecast, with a pretty high degree of confidence, some of these numbers. And I think even with the uncertainty understanding, it doesn't mean the numbers are all junk. I do think there are, this is getting a little bit outside of maybe demography, but it does come up of thinking about these conversations about people coming to community, they're not enrolling their children in public school, people are taking their children out of public school. There are a lot of implications, and probably listeners know them better than I do, about the kind of enrollment loss, particularly in these smaller school divisions. I grew up in one where the public schools were easily the largest employer. They were really the focus of the community. And you think about, we're getting to a Virginia where say a quarter of children in some divisions are educated outside of public school. There is a loss there. I'm all in favor of parents doing what they need to do to educate their children. But that is a shift. The term social capital was invented by, I think it was a public school superintendent in West Virginia, talking about how important public schools were to communities. And that is a bit of a worry, seeing their role seem to be shrinking, particularly since the pandemic. But it is great also hearing a lot of school divisions in Virginia being aware of that and trying to be proactive, trying to figure out how to involve these other families any way they can in the public schools. So it's good that people are trying to adapt to it as well.

Speaker 1: Hamilton Lombard of the Weldon Cooper Center at the University of Virginia, thank you for your thoughts and your insights. You've, it is, you're doing a remarkable job of boiling down and sharpening our understanding of the world around us and what it means. For those of you who want more information, go to www.cooperscenter.org. And remember to log on to publicschoolproud.org for more information on our podcasts and to celebrate Public Schools Week. Thank you.