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Through years of steady pre-COVID enrollment losses in Chicago Public Schools, one thing stayed consistent: Roughly 75% of school-aged children in the city attended the district.
In recent years, though, that “market share” has slipped — a key takeaway of a new report on CPS enrollment by the advocacy group Kids First Chicago released Tuesday. The analysis using U.S. Census data says the loss is small but significant — a dip of more than 4 percentage points since 2018 that accounts for 18,000 fewer students.
Until recently, the portion of school-aged children served by CPS’ district-run and charter schools remained consistent through the mass school closures of 2013, financial troubles, and teacher strikes. Now, it’s slipped closer to 71%.
“There are actually fewer families choosing to send their kids to CPS,” said Hal Woods, the chief of policy at Kids First. He added, pointing to the growing number of students with disabilities the district serves, “Even as CPS is losing students, the needs of the existing students are going up.”
After two years in which migrant student arrivals stabilized the district’s enrollment, CPS resumed losing students this past fall. It enrolled about 9,000 fewer students compared with last year. Overall, the district has lost more than 70,000 students during the past decade, and a growing number of severely underenrolled schools are a major challenge facing it. The district, which slipped to fourth-largest nationally during the pandemic, now serves about 316,200 students.
As the Kids First report noted, these losses have been driven largely by demographic trends outside the district’s control: In fewer than 20 years, the number of babies born in Chicago has been nearly halved. Sharply declining birth rates mean that the deficit-plagued district is poised to continue wrestling with shrinking enrollment.
Meanwhile, most students who left CPS in recent years have done so because their families moved out of Chicago, district data suggests.
The erosion of CPS’ market share preceded the pandemic, but picked up during COVID, with some families opting for private schools and homeschooling during an extended remote learning stretch. Not all of them came back. Private schools now serve a greater share of school-aged children, maintaining a relatively steady enrollment as the number of children shrank.
The portion of school-aged children who are not enrolled in school — including homeschooled students, dropouts, and others — also grew, based on the Kids First analysis of Census data.
The report also noted enrollment declines have been largest on the city’s South and West sides, while student numbers held steady in more affluent North Side and central areas. Parts of the city hardest hit by enrollment loss are home to a growing number of small schools — including high schools serving fewer than 200 students — where students tend to have more limited course and extracurricular offerings.
The per-student costs at some of these tiny schools are eye-popping. But their budgets are barely a rounding error in the district’s overall $10.2 billion budget, Woods noted, though the costs of maintaining their often massive, aging buildings are mounting.
Still, Woods said, “The notion that school consolidations or rightsizing is a panacea for the district’s financial problems is erroneous.” He added, “We see this data as an impetus to talk about what the student experience is like in these low-enrollment schools.”
Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.
