Good morning, CharterFolk.
Today we are pleased to share a Contributor Column from Lyman Millard, who is a Partner at the Bloomwell Group.
We provide a bio for Lyman below.
Lyman Millard has been working to help connect families with better school options for more than 25 years. Since launching Bloomwell Group in 2017, he has partnered with national funders, regional nonprofits, and local school leaders from nearly 300 schools across 26 states on enrollment marketing, growth planning, and market analysis. Prior to starting Bloomwell Group, Lyman was on the founding team of Breakthrough Public Schools, where he helped launch 10 high-performing charter schools in underserved neighborhoods, and the founding team of Citizens Academy, one of Ohio’s oldest public charter schools. He has been part of the Charter School Growth Fund’s Enrollment Community of Practice since 2016. Lyman lives in Cleveland, Ohio and is the proud dad of three charter school alumni.
Where Have All the Kids Gone? And What Do We Do About It?
If you ask most Charter Folk working in school enrollment, they’ll tell you it has gotten a lot harder these past few years.
The emotional scenes in Waiting for Superman, with families waiting anxiously to see if their child has won a coveted spot in the charter school lottery, are a thing of the past. For most schools—particularly in urban communities —lotteries are now a formality with little impact on actual enrollment, leaving school leaders across the country asking the same question: Where have all the kids gone?
Declining Birth Rates and Population Shifts
The culprit? Falling birth rates. Between the 1980s and early 2000s, birth rates fluctuated between 65 and 70 per 1,000 people, annually. But since the Great Recession in 2008, birth rates have declined sharply, falling to nearly 55 births per 1,000 people in the 2020s. When the pandemic hit, some joked about a “COVID baby boom” during lockdowns, but that boom never materialized. Financial insecurity kept many families from growing, further accelerating the decline in school-aged populations.
Total population growth can obscure the looming challenge. Over the past five years, the US Census Bureau reports population growth of 9.3 million people, with significant growth in states like Texas, Florida, and Georgia. This growth hides a stark reality: the 0-9-year-old population (the children in or soon to be entering elementary school) is shrinking. While the overall population grew at a healthy pace, our country has 1.1 million fewer 0-9-year-olds than we did just five years ago.
Even fast-growing states have significantly fewer 0-9-year-olds: Texas added 1.75 million people in the last five years, but its school-aged population shrank by over 40,000 people.
Regional and Urban Disparities
While the decrease in 0-9-year-old population is widespread, it is also uneven. Almost every major metropolitan area is experiencing a steep decline driven by factors including rising housing costs, the shift to work-from-home, safety concerns, and families seeking economic opportunities outside the urban core. Meanwhile, many suburban and exurban areas are seeing significant population growth, putting pressure on schools and districts to keep up with spikes in demand.
Again, Texas provides clear examples of this phenomenon.
Countywide school-aged populations have dropped dramatically around Dallas (32,000), Houston (26,000), McAllen (12,000), Ft. Worth (9,500), and Austin (6,800) over the past five years. In contrast, suburban and exurban communities around McKinney, Plano, The Woodlands, and Georgetown continue to experience significant growth.
Even Florida, one of the few states with a significant increase in school-aged population, shows uneven trends. Central and north-eastern Florida are seeing large increases while we see accelerating declines in the communities around Miami (15,000), St. Petersburg (7,900), and Ft. Lauderdale (7,100).
Impacts on Enrollment
Not surprisingly, this demographic shift has had a direct impact on public school enrollment. As The 74 Million reported last April, The National Center for Education have had to revise their public school enrollment projections downward in each of the last five years. During the pandemic, students left public schools in droves, transferring to private schools, opting for homeschooling, or dropping out altogether. Initially, experts expected a modest rebound in 2021. Those hopes have now faded as the predicted returners never materialized, compounding the impact of declining birth rates. NCES projections now show a continued decline in public school enrollments, with double-digit declines in seven states (including New York and California) over the next five years. Total public school enrollment is projected to dip below 47 million by 2031, an 8% decline from pre-pandemic levels.
Still, the need for high-quality schools that has fueled the charter school movement remains urgent, especially in under-served communities. In a country where only one-third of fourth graders are proficient reading and only slightly better results in math, we need desperately need more schools that can deliver on the promise they are making to families.
As many traditional districts struggle to meet this challenge, charter leaders continue to have opportunities to provide better options—but only if we adapt. Academic stagnation, shrinking school-aged populations, and uneven population growth require charter school leaders to become much more strategic about where we open schools, how we retain students, and how we attract new families.
Smarter Growth Strategies
Charter school leaders, support organizations, and facilities financers must rethink our approach to growth and sustainability. New school leaders will need to become much smarter at crafting comprehensive enrollment strategies that build family engagement, cultivate community partners, and target prospective families. We need a clear understanding of our community demographics and trends to determine whether an area can sustain a new school. We will also need longer planning phases as the six- to eight-month runways often used are no longer sufficient to build the awareness, interest, and enrollment needed to successfully open a school in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Retention and Recruitment
It is also important that we recognize that enrollment is a double-sided challenge. When facing enrollment shortfalls, most leaders focus solely on recruiting more students. The adage that it is cheaper to keep a current customer than find a new one holds true for charter schools, too. It is past time we understand that student attrition rates are critical to maintaining healthy enrollment and a key indicator of a school’s success. Even great schools lose students, especially those serving families living on the margins, but schools that consistently lose more than 25% of their students over a 12-month period need to understand what is driving that exodus (it’s not just families moving) and develop a comprehensive plan for reversing the trend.
In addition to retaining more of our current students, charter leaders need to become much more aggressive about recruiting new students. School leaders can be understandingly hesitant to spend money on marketing, viewing it as a drain on classroom resources. However, under-enrollment—even by five or ten students—can cost a school hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding. The solution, of course, isn’t to throw money at the problem, but to develop a comprehensive student recruitment strategy that engages your current families, cultivates mutually beneficial community partnerships, and connects with prospective families in your area through highly targeted marketing.
The most successful student recruitment strategies focus on building from within. Among schools delivering on the promises they make to families, word-of-mouth referrals remain the most effective method for attracting new families. The good news is that they are also the least expensive recruitment tool in our tool kit. Increasingly, school leaders are optimizing these referrals (doing more of what’s already working) by fostering strong relationships with their families, giving families easy-to-share recruitment tools t, and engaging their most active parents in recruitment events and activities.
Strong community partnerships also play a crucial role. School leaders that develop a specific, actionable plan for building long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with organizations that serve similar families are seeing excellent results. Partnerships with area preschools, social service organizations, extracurricular programs, and local businesses lead to collaborations that build awareness and boost enrollment.
Finally, targeted marketing is another critical component of effective enrollment strategies. Sophisticated digital marketing tools enable schools to identify prospective families in their community based on consumer behavior, public records, and other data. Schools can use this information combined with the ability to track every action taken by prospective families to create personalized campaigns that guide families through the journey from awareness to interest to enrollment.
The most effective recruitment plans weave all three outreach tactics – friends and family, community engagement, and targeted marketing – into a comprehensive strategy that drives in-person engagement. Tours, community events, info sessions, shadow days, and playdates allow families to interact with the school in a low-pressure environment. These events are invaluable for building trust. When done well, they also have exceptionally high conversion rates, with as many as 90% of families enrolling.
The Road Ahead
The next five years will bring difficult realities for many charter schools. Shrinking school-aged populations, uneven demographic trends, and increasing competition will force schools to adapt or close. To survive and thrive, charter school leaders must get smarter about where we open, how we retain families, and how we attract new ones. By focusing on strategic growth, improving family retention, and leveraging targeted marketing and community outreach, charter school leaders can continue to serve families in need and advance their mission.
The future of some of our nation’s best schools—and the charter movement as a whole—depends on it.