The Penn-Harris-Madison School Corporation is projected to lose students over the next decade.
Jerome McKibben of McKibben Demographic Research presented his latest enrollment forecasts to the school board Monday. He projects enrollment to drop from 10,754 students this school year to 10,355 in 2035-2036.
"You’re getting in-migration. You’re getting in transfers. You’re drawing more kids in," McKibben told board members. "But that deficit keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. You haven’t had enough births in this district to maintain your enrollment for 30 years."
He said the situation is similar at most suburban school corporations. Many Indiana counties will start having more deaths than births within the next decade. “Given the recent cuts in foreign immigration, it doesn’t take a Rhodes scholar to figure out figure out what’s going to happen to population growth,” McKibben added.
But he said P-H-M’s enrollment decline should slow slightly after 2030, as a wave of older residents is replaced by younger families with children. He said a big challenge is that empty nesters are staying in place longer, rather than downsizing to smaller homes.
"They have no place to go," McKibben explained. "We did a horrible job of building elder housing in this country. We just don’t have it, not diverse enough types, not in the right places and all that good stuff."
He also noted that household characteristics vary widely across the district. More than half of the households in Northpoint Elementary School’s enrollment area have a child under 18, compared to just 20 percent in Walt Disney Elementary’s enrollment area.
Enrollment helps determine how much education fund money schools receive from the state.
