This school year, Concord families have had to make tough decisions when choosing a learning model for their students that accommodates both student needs and parent work schedules. For some families, the option that worked best was to leave the public school district entirely.
The data reflects those decisions – a newly-released enrollment report shows a decline in enrollment for the Concord School District during this pandemic year.
Members of the Concord School board reviewed the district’s 2020 annual enrollment report at a joint meeting of the Concord School Board’s instructional and finance committees Wednesday night. The report shows the district lost 168 students at the elementary level, 44 from the middle school and about 70 from the Concord Regional Technical Center.
“We had a number of students whose families made the decision to homeschool them, or enroll them in a private school because perhaps they could meet their needs better as a family,” interim superintendent Kathleen Murphy told board members Wednesday.
Concord School District enrollment has decreased generally over the past 10 years, due to population decline of school-age children in New Hampshire. But while enrollment decrease in previous years has been around 1-2%, this year middle school enrollment dropped by 5% while elementary school enrollment dropped by 10%.
Among Concord’s elementary schools, the population went from 1,758 students in the 2019-2020 school year to 1,590 students in the 2020-2021 school year.
At Rundlett Middle School, the population has dropped from about 949 students to 905 students.
The main reason why the CRTC programs experienced a blow to enrollment this year is because some of the program’s sending towns wanted to limit student exposure outside their own districts due to the pandemic, CRTC director Steve Rothenberg told board members.
“We had schools who said, ‘if you go to CRTC you cannot walk on our campus,’” Rothenberg said. “They wanted to insulate their world from our world…It just became so complicated to come here. COVID has really made things hard.”
Rothenberg said the program had about 710-715 students confirmed to attend at the beginning of the year, but due to COVID-19 complications, enrollment dropped about 10%, to 645 students. CRTC lost the most significant number of its students from the Hillsboro, John Stark and Kearsarge districts.
Concord High School’s enrollment did not see a significant enrollment decrease due to COVID-19 – in fact, it increased by about 15 students.
Murphy said Wednesday that she has tasked school principals with calling all the families who left the district, to see who will be returning next year. So far she is predicting that many students will be returning after the pandemic, with the possible exception of high school students, who are more likely to finish their degree at the school they transferred to.