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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’ve checked a few elementaries so far in a variety of areas and a variety of income levels/FARMS rates and demographics, and every one has had a membership decrease vs. the end of last school year. I compared the number on the school profile for “Enrollment as of September 202526:” to the total that I got for 2024-25 under the Demographics tab and adding up each grade total under the grade level section. I’ll post some findings in a bit when I’m done having lunch. But so far, this looks like a demographic change/aging population/fewer kids issue vs. a “people aren’t coming to school because of the fear of immigration raids” issue or whatever Reid wants to claim so that they can continue to claim the same amount of school funding/taxes for fewer students. [/quote]

Across the division if you compare September 2025 vs. September 2024 it appears there are more students in grades 4, 7, and 9, and fewer students in every other grade.  Overall they down over 3000 students since September 2024 and over 4000 students since June 2025.

If there are fewer students, they will probably say the population is needier (although that's open to debate, as the biggest decline in enrollment this year is Hispanic students, who tend to be higher needs) or that they have to make up for a loss of federal funding, and they still need more money from county taxpayers. [/quote]

Current 4th being larger is likely due to increased redshirting in that grade in particular - kids born in 2015 who otherwise would have had to go to Covid/virtual Kindergarten. The other grades are probably just larger grades since those kids were already enrolled in school when Covid hit. [/quote]
Yes.  The drop in ES numbers is because all the grades who started pre-covid are aging out into middle school and the covid years with lower numbers are the bulk of the schools now.  Many kids went private due to covid and never came back, and many families pushed off having kids or had fewer.  This is not a permanent demographic shift.  The upward population push will (and has) continued in the years since.  It's moronic to imply we should make long term changes based on covid numbers.[/quote]

What "long term" changes are we at risk of making based on Covid numbers?   The point of having reviews every five years is that we aren't locked into one set of boundaries forever.  [/quote]
I'm saying the size of current grades 5 and 6 is absolutely smaller due to covid.  Current 6th graders were subjected to virtual kindergarten, which was a disaster, and many went private instead.  The next year started virtually so many of those students also went private.  During those covid years the US population growth rate cratered, but started going back up in 2022 and has increased ever since.  Do we plan based on covid numbers like this person posting ~25 student drops in elementary school totals?  Or do we plan based on decades of population growth trends absent a cataclysmic pandemic?[/quote]

When you have consistent 25 student dropoffs at most elementary schools, that’s the 3000-4000 lower enrollment that Reid was talking about. She’s trying to claim it’s all families afraid of ICE activity. It clearly is not. It’s happening even at schools that should have low ICE involvement just based on their overall demographics.

We aren’t continuing on the path of population growth. The years of highest birth rates have already passed. Those kids born in the highest birth rate years (2006-2008) have largely graduated from high school now. They are being replaced by fewer and fewer children who were born in the 2020s. This is all easily verifiable. It should concern you that FCPS is going to continue asking for the same if not larger amounts of money while educating fewer and fewer children.  [/quote]

Experts still project overall population growth for Fairfax County. Urbanization is still a long-term trend. UVA updated their numbers in July and are projected FFX County total population to be pretty flat until 2030, then increasing about 0.3-0.4% per year through 2050. So increased population, lower birth rates, and TBD on public school enrollment rates; the latter were down during pandemic and aftermath but are slowly creeping back upwards. There's probably other factors but those seem like the big 3 indicators and they aren't all pointing in the same direction, so likely won't see any large movements in student enrollments one way or the other unless there's another shock to the system. Nationwide birth rates are back up slightly past two years (12 per 1000 people) which is highest since 2016, but still lower than anytime before that. Possible we've seen the nadir on that metric though.[/quote]

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