Part I: Where have all the children gone?

Part 1 of a 3-day series

An alarming number of students were conspicuously absent from class when schools in the East Valley reconvened in August.

Part II - Housing slump sends schools scrambling

Part III - A look at the future of the East Valley schools

Half of the 10 school districts in the area reported a loss in enrollment from the same time the previous year. Some of the biggest hits were felt in Mesa, Tempe and Apache Junction districts, where about 2,500 students who were expected to be there never showed up.

INTERACTIVE: Click to view enrollment changes in E.V. schools

Despite tremendous growth in the East Valley over the last decade, the inability to predict population variations, the effects of competition created through open enrollment and the sudden change in the housing market have left school administrators and governing boards guessing about the future of their schools and grasping at ways to quickly address the holes left in their budgets as students seemingly disappear.

Earlier this year, a Mesa community grappled with the results of that instability when the school board looked at one way to address this problem. Parents panicked when they heard the Mesa Unified School District was considering closing Jordan Elementary, a school with a great reputation for its special-education programs.

People flooded the auditorium at Hendrix Junior High School during several meetings pleading for the district to save Jordan and find another way to save money. They said closing the school would change the very essence of their community.

"The school brings families in the neighborhood together," said Cindy Kirstein, a mother of four children, two of whom attend Jordan. "It is a school that offers so much more than just the basic education. It has so many after-school programs for students to choose from. It offers our kids a sense of community and togetherness."

GRAPHIC: Click for a larger view

District officials had a dilemma. No one wants to close a school. But they were facing a $20 million budget deficit. They had been steadily losing students for several years and although they were predicting declines, the actual numbers seemed to keep coming in larger than anticipated. On top of that, the cost of doing business kept going up.

"There are 40 different factors at play when you're making a decision like that," said Rich Crandall, school board president. "First, you have to look at why enrollment declined. If it's because of foreclosures, well, those houses won't be empty forever. That's different from aging neighborhoods where there are people in those homes but they don't have kids."

Mesa Unified, the largest school district in Arizona, is facing both situations.

So are other districts in the East Valley that are having similar, emotionally charged conversations about how to address this loss of students.

Last spring, dozens of parents squeezed into the boardroom of the Tempe Elementary School District to hear that their schools would have larger classes and fewer programs in the coming year and may also have to consider a school closure.

Over a series of months, people in Scottsdale have turned out in droves to give input into how their district might consolidate several schools.

In all of these situations, the resounding question from the audience has been "Why?" In each case, the answer has been the same: increased costs and declining enrollment.

The Tribune's analysis of enrollment data reported to the Arizona Department of Education shows that from the 2003-04 school year to the 2007-08 school year, three districts - Kyrene Elementary, Tempe Elementary and Mesa Unified - had overall declines in their student population. The declines were even more dramatic this year in three districts: Apache Junction lost 260 students, Tempe Elementary lost 269 and Mesa lost 2,100. Several other school districts experienced sharp ups and downs during that time.

Even in the districts that grew over the last five years, such as Chandler and Gilbert, there were individual neighborhoods that had dramatic declines in the number of children enrolled in their schools.

These decreases defy not only local projections but even national ones.

The U.S. population has grown larger than ever - exceeding 300 million in 2006.

However, the U.S. is about to see the first overall decline in more than a decade in the number of high school graduates, according to a study released this year by Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education titled "Knocking at the College Door."

The report warns that state education agencies and postsecondary institutions used to planning for an ever-larger demand for students will need to adjust as the supply of high school graduates begins to gradually decline after 2008.

The same study predicts that Arizona will be among just six states - the others being Utah, Nevada, Texas, Florida and Georgia - to escape the trend by continuing to experience explosive growth.

Yet that seems to contradict what is happening specifically in the East Valley, where public school districts have been regularly reporting a loss in enrollment for a couple of years now and are looking down the road to more declines in the near future.

"It's a horribly difficult time to be a demographer and try to estimate the number of people," said John Arnold, director of the Arizona School Facilities Board, the state agency that funds the construction of new schools. "Ten years from now, we will have grown a lot, but within the next five years no one knows what the growth rate will be."

Declines in much of the East Valley have been masked by the tremendous growth happening in select areas, but as that growth stalls the losses are starting to show.

Mesa's natural cycle of growth and decline in the student body is changing because of the economy and the mortgage crisis, said Joe O'Reilly, director of research and evaluation for Mesa Unified.

"We projected we'd have fewer students, but the decline was even larger than we thought," he said.

This year, Mesa started school with 2,100 fewer students than last year and about 700 fewer than what was projected during the budget-making process.

One reason school projections have been off is that the population in Arizona was overestimated, said Kent Ennis, co-chairman of Arizona's Data Estimates and Projections Task Force, primarily because of the housing boom of a few years ago that made it appear as though more people were coming than actually did.

"Some of those houses were never permanently occupied," he said.

Traditionally, in Arizona, the population has been undercounted as the state struggled to keep up with growth.

And Arizona wasn't alone in its underestimates. The U.S. Census Bureau undercounted the people in the state in both its 1990 and 2000 censuses.

The task force was formed by Gov. Janet Napolitano to try to get a better handle on these estimates, recognizing how important they are to infrastructure planning.

The conclusion of the task force's report is that Arizona needs to do a better job specifically with regard to identifying various demographic groups, Ennis said. To that end, the group has recommended hiring a state demographer who will concentrate solely on this.

With all of the unpredictability in the economy at this time, that person will not have it easy.

Projections are made using information from many sources, O'Reilly said. Data are collected from the census, birth rates and fertility rates, city planning departments, government agencies and more. Districts look at the history of the school, how many students are usually born in the district who remain there long enough to show up for the first day of kindergarten.

For years, Mesa schools shared an employee with the city planning department in order to have the best communication possible between the two. He went as far as to pull information on when water meters were turned on to have the most current information he could have about how many houses were occupied.

But none of that seems to matter when something truly unexpected happens.

"There's an earthquake in California, and suddenly, a bunch of new kids will show up here. You never really know," O'Reilly said. "No one could have predicted the savings and loan crisis."

The reason schools need to know how many kids to expect is that districts are not set up, bureaucratically, to quickly make changes. Teacher contracts can't be canceled after class has been in session for a month. New schools can't be torn down after the framework is already erected.

And parents want to know where their children will attend when the first day of school rolls around. Shifting school boundaries and shuffling kids upsets parents and could cause them to send their children somewhere else, a move school officials agree no one wants to see happen.

Arizona's public schools receive per pupil funding from the state to pay for programs and teachers, so a loss of students equates to millions of dollars lost from the budgets of these districts.

A loss of two or three students from a classroom is not enough to get rid of that class, meaning the district still pays for the teacher and other associated costs even though there may be thousands of dollars less to put into that class.

That makes balancing a budget tricky.

There is no magic number when it comes to how many is too many students to lose. However, losing more than 2 percent of the district's total is normally when administrators get nervous, said Chuck Essigs, of the Arizona Association of School Business Officials.

That's because each year districts get a 2 percent cost-of-inflation increase in state funding to help pay for schools. If they lose more than 2 percent of the student body, that increase is canceled out, he said. Any more than that, and schools consider it a loss.

Within a district, it's tough to keep things stable, O'Reilly said.

Losing 2 percent of students at a single school may not have much of an impact. But administrators have to try to spread out the number of students and programs at each school to make access efficient and fair and to make sure the district's money is being spent wisely.

Many of the procedures used by districts to predict enrollment are also employed by the Arizona School Facilities Board to determine how many new schools to fund.

Arnold said the No. 1 priority of the organization is to ensure there is sufficient square footage per student available in the school district.

This is mandated by the Legislature. For example, in grades kindergarten through six, each district must have 80 square feet per pupil available.

"We need to ensure a district would not fall below that," he said. "So we build in anticipation of the district needing the space."

The Chandler Unified School District opened two new elementary schools this year, and neither is full. But they were never intended to be, said district spokesman Terry Locke.

"We like to open them at 50 percent capacity," he said. "If we opened them full, with the growth we've been having, we'd have to change the boundaries every year. Students would have to change schools after just one year, and that really upsets a family."

When the East Valley was growing rapidly just a few years ago, schools would be full before new ones could be built.

Even with slowing growth and the housing situation the way it is, Locke said he is still confident Chandler will fill all its schools and said it's "nice to be ahead of growth for a change."

The law is clear that the facilities board has to look at a district's overall capacity for students and the overall available space when granting requests for new buildings. This can make things especially difficult for geographically far-reaching districts such as Mesa, which may need a school on the city's east side but have too few students in its west side schools to qualify for one.

"In some cases it can be very difficult," Arnold said. "One of the most egregious examples is the Kyrene (Elementary) school district. They had the most growth on the west side of I-10, the Ahwatukee (Foothills) side, but they were at capacity on the east side, the Tempe side."

The facilities board couldn't fund a new school for Kyrene because, overall, under the state school construction formula, the district had enough room for all of its students. "So (the district) raised local money to build the school on the west side of I-10," he said.

School districts will often turn to local taxpayers to fund school construction through bond issues when the facilities board denies them funding for a new school.

The school facilities board forces districts to look out seven years in advance when requesting a new school, but will only grant funding for projects needed in two years for elementary and three years for middle or high schools. That generally gives districts one year for design and one year for construction once they are sure they have the funding.

Arnold said the board will re-review the student population just prior to starting construction, in order to make sure they are only building schools that are necessary.

"Until you put a shovel in the ground, we can stop construction," he said.

However, the process is not perfect. During fiscal 2008, the facilities board put more than a dozen school construction projects on hold because the original projections were too aggressive.

And because the board tries to work ahead of development, problems develop when projections change. The area in Pinal County served by the J.O. Combs Unified School District is a good example of one that had been dramatically affected by the change in Arizona's economy.

It had been projected to be a huge population center in the near future.

"But right now, it's all come to a grinding halt," Arnold said. "We are building schools there, but will they fill up? Probably not."

Meanwhile, older school districts such as Mesa will continue to be challenged with their own shifting demographics.

Some officials have said if they could have picked up a school on the west side of Mesa and moved it east a few years ago, they would be in better shape.

They avoided closing Jordan this year, electing to cut from programs and services in other places, but board members say they probably won't be able to avoid school closures for long.

"In the next two to three years, we will see school closings. Here, in Scottsdale, in Tempe," Crandall said. "No one wants to be in the position Tucson is in today. They never, ever closed a school. Now they have 20 too many. Maybe saying that makes me something of a hypocrite because during my term in Mesa we've never closed a school. But we've just reached a critical point."

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