Enrollment is on the decline in many school districts and is expected to continue through 2030, according to some forecasts. The speakers at Friday’s conference session, “The Small School Challenge: Strategies for Optimizing Student Experience (and Resources) in Low Enrollment Schools,” at the AASA National Conference on Education in New Orleans, look to creatively address this challenge.

“The best small schools make strategic choices about people, time and money,” Jonathan Travers, president of Education Resource Strategies in Watertown, Mass., said.

Neither Travers nor Rob Anderson, superintendent at Boulder Valley School District in Boulder, Colo., said they wanted school closures to be the answer to declining school enrollment.

Concessions have to be made in small schools, Anderson said. “You can have some things, but you can’t have everything.”

A school in his district, Heatherwood Elementary in Boulder Colo., shifted to being a science, technology, engineering, art and math-based school rather than offering STEAM along with music and dance. Specializing in one thing well can be a good solution to limited resources, Anderson said.

Another surprising challenge in small schools is, Travers said, “the smallest and largest classes all are in the smallest schools.” Strategies such as “semesterizing” (condensing full-year classes into a single semester) and interdisciplinary classes facilitate the consolidation of classes, he said.

“Low enrollment exacerbates teachers' workloads and isolates them because of limited collaboration opportunities,” Travers said. Looking for solutions such as interdisciplinary classes and semesterizing are essential to maintaining advanced learning experiences for students.

Additionally, “third-party partnerships are far more effective at small schools” due to the ability to outsource educators, Travers said. He also offered solutions such as multi-grade or multi-age classrooms, which consolidated teachers and students.

Anderson introduced two main phases of low enrollment. The first is the enrollment advisory phase, and the second is the community engagement phase. “We need to see it coming from further away,” he said, “buying yourself time, while not compromising other work is essential to school-preservation.” 

The second phase of community engagement highlights the communities’ commitment to the schools leading to “community problem solving,” Anderson said. “It starts with the premise of what is important to us, then figure out what moves to make when consolidating resources,” Travers said.

“Focusing on specialized programming, continuing to operate at the established staffing funding formula or reallocating grade levels with neighboring schools” are solutions found within the community, Anderson said. If decisions can be found among the families in the school district, it creates less tension when school districts are eventually forced to change the structure of schools.

Anderson also pushes for communities to halt declining enrollment by encouraging others to go to the struggling schools. “Who here knows more than one student not enrolled at this school?” he asked at a community meeting. Almost everybody raised their hand. If community members can push to improve enrollment rates, some of the unpleasant changes may not have to be made, Anderson said.

Low enrollment pushes educators to find creative solutions to avoid school closures. Small schools also don’t have to be a negative, but can rather be home to thriving communities full of enriching programs, Anderson said.

(Ruthie Feinstein, a sophomore at Benjamin Franklin High School in New Orleans, is a reporter for Conference Daily Online.)