Mat-Su population up, but school enrollment down

A conundrum Mat-Su school and local government officials face is why school enrollment is dropping while the borough’s population has been rising.

“We’ve lost 400 students in the last four years. That’s a whole elementary school. But the borough has attracted 10,000 or more new population. Where are the kids?” Borough assembly person Stefanie Nowers asked.

School superintendent Randy Traini said he’s puzzled, too.

“It’s counter-intuitive because when you drive around and see all these new homes being built you’d think you’d see more kids in school,” he said in a meeting of a joint Mat-Su school board and assembly Dec. 9.

There may be explanations, but they are complicated, Traini said. One is that new houses does not equate to school enrollment if Mat-Su’s growth is levelling off, which it appears to be.

The school district hired a demographer to help local officials plan for school enrollment. The conclusion was that school populations would likely remain flat at least for the near-term, Traini said. The State of Alaska’s demographers agree with that and are even slightly more negative, he said.

Other Alaska communities are facing more serious declines in school enrollments and it’s mostly tied to a flat state economy, Traini said. State labor economists also point to an ongoing migration of working-age adults with families out of state to better job prospects in the Lower 48, which translates to fewer children in schools.

Or at least fewer children in public schools. What may also be happening is that the children, or many of them, are still here but no longer in public schools. Instead they are being home-schooled and enrolled in correspondence courses.

Homeschooling is becoming increasingly popular in many communities and there are a wide variety of correspondence programs being offered by school districts statewide including in Mat-Su. However, this may point to a problem of poaching of students from Mat-Su by correspondence schools outside the borough.

These operate statewide. They are also public schools operated by other school districts and receive state funding. This means money goes to the home district where they are located, such as Galena, on the Yukon River, rather than to Mat-Su schools.

Correspondence schools also market aggressively and some offer perks like enhanced cash stipends as well as automatic exemption from required student performance testing required in traditional public schools and charter schools. One of the most aggressive correspondence marketers is in Galena, where its school district as 300 to 400 resident students and about 8,000 enrolled through correspondence study, Trani said.

Traini estimates that about 3,000 children who live in Mat-Su are enrolled in correspondence programs operated from outside the region.

“We need to get these kids back,” he said.

It drains state funding from Mat-Su’s traditional and charter schools including Mat-Su Central, which supports home-schooling with the district’s own correspondence courses.

But it works the other way, too, Traini said. About 300 home-schooled and correspondence students enrolled in Mat-Su Central actually live in Anchorage. One of the challenges is that many parents and students in Mat-Su enrolled in correspondence programs do not realize their selected program is not operated locally, school board members said at the Dec. 2 meeting. A marketing program, which Trani said Mat-Su has so far not done, could help address this.

Mat-Su is not the only school district experiencing these problems. Fairbanks Mayor Grier Hopkins said his school district is also experiencing a drop in public school enrollment but the actual school-age population hasn’t dropped as much. Many of the Fairbanks children are still there, Hopkins said, but they are opting increasingly for home-schooling through correspondence study, he said.

Meanwhile, a concern for Traini and other educators have is that few of the correspondence and home-schooled students are tested to assess performance, so there’s no way to gauge the effectiveness of the programs or for parents to know how well their children are really learning.

The exemption is allowed under a 2015 state statute change that was sponsored by Gov. Dunleavy when he was in the state Senate. All students are technically required to be tested but the change sponsored by Dunleavy allows parents to “opt out” of the tests for their children. Most correspondence and home-schooled students do opt out for a variety of reasons. “Seventy five percent of the kids don’t take it,” (the test) Trani told state legislators in a hearing on education earlier this year.

“It’s not that our homeschool kids are being any different, it’s that in homeschools across the state about 22,000 kids, aren’t taking any assessments. We have this very antithetical ‘accountability’. We have homeschool ‘choice’ but no one has to take the accountability measure. It doesn’t square,” he told legislators.

Competition with homeschooling and correspondence programs are one answer but not the only one to assembly person Nowers’ question about enrollment. A rising population of seniors who are retiring and living locally or even moving to the region, and who have grown children, may also explain part of the problem. Gradually declining birth rates are also affecting school enrollments statewide, including in Mat-Su, school board members pointed out at the joint meeting with the assembly.