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The capacity of high schools that Portland Public Schools intends to rebuild is much greater than the number of students expected to attend them. How big a problem is that? It depends on how much stock you place in the enrollment forecasts by Portland State University’s Population Research Center.
PSU researchers have delivered gloomy projections to the school district since the pandemic. Not only do they expect the district’s overall high school enrollment to decline by 18% over the next eight years, they foresee that the two high schools whose rebuilds are on the May ballot will lose students, and Jefferson High School will see little change after its overhaul (see graphs right).
But in interviews with WW, parents, teachers, bond campaigners and School Board members all express skepticism about just how much the district should rely on projections.
“It’s not best practice to build a $350 to $400 million project based on a five-year enrollment projection,” says Tony Morse, manager of the Yes for Portland Schools bond campaign.
Morse points out that enrollment projections in the mid-2000s predicted that the number of students in the disterict would hold steady and decline, but PPS experienced growth between 2010 and 2018 as parents responded to the 2008 recession, and migration to Portland increased beyond initial expectations.
Dr. Ethan Sharygin, director of the Population Research Center at PSU, acknowledges that forecasts generally “reflect the assumption of the continuation of the status quo.” That means PSU didn’t forecast a rebound from a recession, or the fallout from COVID-19. He says his team considers birth rates and migration in the long term.
“Portland has been at a pretty significant out-migration over the past five years, and in the long run, we do expect that to return and stabilize,” he says. “That’s why you don’t see enrollment falling off a cliff. It would be much lower than our projections.”
Still, Sharygin stands by his center’s numbers, and he’s backed by national experts. Dr. Thomas Dee, an economist and professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, says projections of declining enrollment are a consensus among researchers who study enrollment patterns. “I think that’s really reasonable,” he says of the PSU projections.
Dee has conducted research on school districts across the country that have seen declining enrollment since the pandemic. There was an exodus from public schools during that time, he says, especially as families opted for private school and others moved out of cities entirely because parents could work from home.
“Those kids haven’t come back, and there’s little reason to expect them to come back,” Dee says. “It’s important to recognize that part of the reason school districts have lost so much enrollment, it was really parents voting with their feet in response to what happened during the pandemic.”
In response to criticisms that projections don’t hold up as well over time, Sharygin says it’s true that near-term forecasts are more accurate (forecasts have generally erred by less than 1%). Fifteen years out, he says, the variables start to outnumber the sure things.
But he says PSU’s numbers tell a basic demographic story: In 15 years, kids who are now toddlers will be in high school. The number of 3-year-olds probably won’t change much, given that Portland struggles to attract families, and that will influence the number of high schoolers. “I’d be very surprised,” Sharygin says, “if we missed something large.”