A couple of years ago, leaders at a Montessori school in Newton, Massachusetts, asked their board chair where all the 3-year-olds were. “They’re not coming,” she told them.

The board chair was Cara Candal, now vice president of policy at ExcelinEd, and she’s the source of today’s headline from The 74: “There just aren’t enough kids.” Linda Jacobson’s story is a tour of the demographic decline as it lands on every sector at once. Georgia’s fertility rate fell 17% between 2007 and 2023, roughly the national figure. California had 166,306 fewer births over that stretch. School closures nationally rose from 755 in 2021-22 to more than 1,000 last year.

The empty seats are showing up in every sector. In Atlanta, the closure list included two KIPP campuses alongside district buildings. Fifteen Denver charters have closed in recent years. An Orange County board pulled a charter in July after the school projected 122 students and enrolled 73. An AEI survey found nearly half of charter leaders in Arizona, Florida and Utah now blame education savings accounts for their own losses. Candal’s answer is that choice can’t be the scapegoat.

Tulsa got there first. The school board voted Monday to close or consolidate 17 schools in 2027-28, K-12 Dive reports, after enrollment fell from about 40,900 in October 2016 to 32,500 this month. The district had told its board in September that it would need 2,600 more students to balance the budget at current staffing. It plans to recruit some of them through virtual programs open to families outside the district.

The numbers from four other systems this week point the same direction. Bloomberg reports NYC Public Schools expects to lose 153,000 students over the next decade, from more than 1 million in 2015-16 to roughly 721,000 by 2034-35, and Chancellor Kamar Samuels says district-level plans could include mergers and co-locations. Montgomery County, Maryland, is educating just under 152,000 students this year, down more than 4,000, the steepest one-year drop in nearly five decades outside of COVID, The Baltimore Banner reports. “The headline is that there are fewer births,” Superintendent Thomas Taylor said. Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville enrolled more than 100,000 students a decade ago and about 92,600 this fall, and the Courier Journal found that a drop in multilingual learners accounts for 47% of this year’s decline alone. Even D.C., which grew for 15 years, lost about 200 students last year, and WAMU notes the under-enrolled buildings are concentrated in Wards 7 and 8, where closures are hardest to make.

The other response is going younger. Kate Rix reports for The 74 that California’s Berryessa Union School District closed three elementary schools and then installed child-sized sinks and toilets at one of them to serve 150 infants, toddlers and preschoolers. The bet is that families who start with the district at age one stay through kindergarten. Los Angeles Unified voted to double its infant care programs on the same theory, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani expanded New York’s program for 2-year-olds this week with the stated goal of keeping young families in the city. Erica Greenberg at the Urban Institute says the approach worked in D.C., Boston and Tulsa, where districts cleared cost and convenience hurdles.

Higher ed is running the same play from the other end. WBUR reports Massachusetts state universities posted their first enrollment increase since 2013, driven by a 16.6% jump in transfers, most from community colleges made free in recent years. CUNY is up 3.2% to 253,000, with nearly 10,000 adults enrolled through Gov. Hochul’s free community college program. CUNY is still about 7% below pre-pandemic levels, and Mario Delci, Massachusetts’ associate commissioner for research, cautioned that the free-college boom is already moderating, with the enrollment cliff still ahead.

In Vallejo, a nonprofit bought a shuttered 1950s elementary school for $2 million and spent $18 million turning it into an early learning center. One infant classroom there has 11 children enrolled and a waiting list of 10.

— Thomas

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