Schools Face Record Enrollments

More students will enroll in the nation’s schools this fall than ever before, surpassing a peak reached 25 years ago and causing a serious strain on school budgets, the Education Department said Wednesday.

“When school starts this year, I would hope that most districts have analyzed their own situation and prepared for it,” said Education Secretary Richard W. Riley, who released a report detailing the department’s findings.

The student enrollment record of 51.7 million students this fall will continue to be broken every year for the next 10 years, amounting to a 15% increase by 2006, the report said. California, which has the largest student population in the country at 5.8 million, is expected to lead the surge, adding a million more students over the next 10 years.

California will have to find seats for an additional 525,000 high school students by 2006 and build 20,000 new classrooms, according to Riley and Mamie Starr, who chairs the Coalition for Adequate School Housing of California.

Although California faces the largest increase, 31 other states also will see substantial growth in their student populations. Nationwide, districts across the country will need 6,000 more schools and 190,000 more teachers at an estimated cost of $15.1 billion.

The growth poses serious problems for many school districts already strapped for funds, officials said.

The trend, dubbed “the baby boom echo” by the Education Department, is reminiscent of the enrollment growth caused by the baby boomers themselves--the children of the World War II generation. Born between 1946 and 1964, they produced a peak school enrollment of 51.3 million students in 1971--a record that remained in place until this fall.

Between the early 1970s and the mid-1980s, enrollment waned and districts experienced the sometimes painful process of closing schools to save money. But the numbers began to rise again once baby boomers married and had children of their own.

After a downward slope since 1971, the “echo” looks like an upward curve beginning in the mid-1980s and extending to 2006.

“We are really at the midpoint of a long, slow, rising wave,” Riley said in describing how the “echo” looks when charted on a graph.

The “baby boom echo” is not the only factor in the most recent enrollment increase. Education Department statisticians also point to three others, two of which appear to explain why California is witnessing a more dramatic change than other states:

* Black and Latino birthrates have been higher than rates for the population as a whole. For California, where the black and Latino populations are large, the effect has been more significant.

* Immigration has reached record levels in some parts of the country. School systems in so-called “gateway cities” like Los Angeles and San Diego have felt the impact most strongly.

The report also said that more teenagers are staying in school until graduation.

The enrollment spurt has forced many districts to scramble for funds, rent portable classrooms and experiment with year-round education programs and Saturday classes.

Even in places like California that have anticipated the growth, money has not always been made available.

“We planned ahead. We knew the numbers. We knew where we were going to put schools [and] reserved the land. [But] it always came down to the bottom line that the funding wasn’t available,” Starr said.

“For me, it really is like running through a tunnel with a giant bear after you. You don’t dare look back and you know, in fact, it is gaining on you,” said Brian Cram, superintendent of the Clark County, Nev., school district (Las Vegas) where voters just approved funding for 24 new schools--not enough, many believe, to meet the district’s needs.