Slowing enrollment declines are pushing back the projections on when Boulder Valley's smallest elementary schools could end up in a community engagement process to avoid potential closure.
The school board discussed the district's second annual enrollment trends report at Tuesday's meeting. The annual report was one of the recommendations by the Long Range Advisory Committee, which was created in the 2022-23 school year to help the district respond to shrinking enrollment art many of its elementary schools.
Boulder Valley's enrollment dropped by only about .5% this school year, an almost 1% improvement over the decline the district was expecting. The previous school year, the district's enrollment dropped about 1%. In the fall of 2022, it was down 2%.
This fall, the district enrolled about 140 fewer K-12 students than the previous year, for a total of 27,132 students. While projections still show the district losing students over the next five years, the loss is expected to remain small.
"We're trending in the direction we would have hoped for when we started this," Superintendent Rob Anderson said.
Boulder Valley uses the enrollment trends report to identify schools for a community engagement process. The process is triggered when enrollment declines below 50% capacity, the school has one-and-a-half classes or fewer per grade level, and the school is projected to continue at that level for at least five years.
Heatherwood, which is in Gunbarrel north of Boulder, was the first Boulder Valley school to reach a small enough size to go through the process. Heatherwood's enrollment in 2023, at 226 students, was only enough for one-and-a-half classes at each grade level. The building, designed for about 500 students, also was at about 40% of capacity.
An advisory group recommended an environmental STEM focus to attract more students to Heatherwood. The school plans to launch the new program in the fall of 2025.
Another eight elementary schools have fewer than two classes at each grade level and are around 60% of capacity, placing them in the enrollment advisory phase. Those schools are Coal Creek in Louisville, Community Montessori in Boulder, Eisenhower in Boulder, Eldorado in Superior, Flatirons in Boulder, Kohl in Broomfield, Mesa in Boulder and Whittier in Boulder. This phase mainly creates awareness for the school community.
"The design of advisory was just to be transparent," Anderson said. "It's a no-surprises type of a notification."
No schools were added to the community engagement phase this year.
In five years, the district is projecting three schools could be in the engagement phase: Heatherwood, Kohl and Whittier. The projections don't take into consideration the changes Boulder Valley is making to slow down declining enrollment -- or those designed to increase enrollment at Heatherwood.
"We had a big kindergarten class; that helps our projections going forward," Boulder Valley Senior Planner Glen Segrue said. "Just a small bump in projections can influence a lot of those schools."
The school board also saw a preview Tuesday of an enrollment data dashboard the district plans to add to its website in several weeks. The dashboard provides data in various visual formats, including allowing people to look at school capacity by regions, at open enrollment numbers and at enrollment gains and losses by month.
"We wanted to focus on what we felt like was the most important data we can use to help us monitor trends," said Rob Price, Boulder Valley's assistant superintendent of operations.