JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
As we continue our series on the cost of living, today we're looking at public education. Across the U.S., school districts are closing schools, and these closures are a sign of larger forces in the economy, including affordability. Our colleagues Wailin Wong and Adrian Ma with The Indicator explain.
ADRIAN MA, BYLINE: You ever see a movie or TV show where there's a town hall meeting, and then a bad guy, like some out-of-town consultant, parachutes into this meeting and everyone gets mad at them? Well, when it comes to public school closures, Tracy Richter is that guy.
TRACY RICHTER: I just don't want to be known as a national expert on school closure. But unfortunately, this is the role that has found me in this time of my career.
MA: Tracy's official title is vice president of planning services for a company called HPM. HPM does construction management for different industries, including K-12 education.
WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: Tracy says that the happy part of his job is advising districts on projects like building a new school. The grim part, and the one that he's doing more of these days, is helping districts figure out what to do with school buildings that don't have enough students in them.
MA: Atlanta Public Schools is one of Tracy's current clients. And while the district has a capacity for 70,000 students, the enrollment is just 50,000.
WONG: Tracy points to a couple reasons for the drop in enrollment, not just in Atlanta but across the country. No. 1, and this is the big one, families are having fewer children. The birth rate in the U.S. has fallen more than 20% since 2007. That's the year the Great Recession officially started.
RICHTER: I think that the birth rates are going to stay low, but that's not all of it.
MA: That brings us to a second reason behind falling enrollment, which is housing. Tracy says a lack of affordable housing options in large metro areas is keeping young families away. Combine the falling birth rate with a difficult housing market and you get some communities with fewer students. This poses an existential problem for public schools because part of their state and federal funding is based on per pupil enrollment. Fewer students means less money coming in, while certain expenses like building maintenance, they stay constant.
WONG: Erica Meltzer is the national editor at Chalkbeat. It's a nonprofit news organization that covers education. And she says low enrollment is a widespread problem right now for public school districts of all sizes.
ERICA MELTZER: For a lot of these communities, you start to have questions of, is the school operating in an efficient manner? Can they afford a nurse, an art teacher, a music teacher, a social worker? And increasingly, the answer is no.
MA: Erica says it doesn't take a big exodus of students to put a school into a death spiral.
MELTZER: Sometimes, the difference of just five or 10 kids can be sort of that make-or-break point because if you have, you know, $10,000 per student, that's $50,000 or $100,000. And that starts to be several staff positions. Like, can you have classroom aides? It can be as little as five or 10 students in the overall enrollment of a school that become the point where they can no longer offer a robust range of services.
WONG: School closures can be really disruptive to families. Students may lose connections they've made with friends and teachers. And research has linked closures with negative effects on academic performance.
MA: Erica says the pandemic delayed a reckoning for some school districts because they received emergency federal funding. But today, that money has been spent. And Erica says the Trump administration has prioritized access to private schools over investment in public education. And in fact, the huge tax and spending bill the president signed this year, it created a federal program to help families pay for private school.
WONG: The federal program is the first of its kind, and it comes amid a major uptick in statewide private school programs. Still, Erica says she doesn't believe those vouchers are a main cause of the public school enrollment decline. But these programs are expanding and that adds a new dimension to the school closure conversations happening around the country.
MELTZER: You have the individual choices that parents are making, thinking about their kid, and then there's the system-level effects of millions of individual choices, and then there's sort of the policy universe that creates the choices that are available to the parents.
WONG: Wailin Wong.
MA: Adrian Ma, NPR News.
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