Data gatherers and analysts have a sobering message for public school educators and policymakers. The post-pandemic decline in student enrollment may linger for the rest of this decade, leading to the possibility of widespread closings of schools in communities across the United States.

As a state growing, but unevenly, in population, North Carolina may avoid becoming one of the hardest-hit states. Still, in the aftermath of coronavirus outbreak, tests to education governance loom for both local and state officials in coping with political turbulence, demographic trends, and the anxieties of parents and students.

School closings and consolidations add a layer of emotional complexity to those tests.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reports that enrollment in U.S. public elementary and secondary schools declined by 2.1% from fall 2017 to fall 2022 — dropping from 50.7 million students to 49.6 million.

In collaboration with the Brookings Institution, The 74, an online education news organization, recently published analyses of national enrollment trends. The 74 reported that 4,428 schools in the country “reached or exceeded a 20% decline’’ over four years that included the pandemic.

According to NCES data, North Carolina public schools have not experienced an overall decline as severe as the national rate. From fall 2017 to fall 2022, the state’s public school enrollment declined 0.8%, from 1.55 million to 1.54 million students.

The NCES data show that enrollment in the Tar Heel state took a hit during the 2019-2020 pandemic period and then rebounded modestly the next two years. Nevertheless, NCES projects an enrollment slide from 1.54 million down to 1.18 million students by 2031.

A complex context

Enrollment decline may spread across the state and nation, but not uniformly. Both current politics and underlying population movements contribute to the developing education decision-making landscape.

Out of the pandemic — what may be the defining catastrophe of our lifetimes — arose an intensification of political divisions over education policy and school practices. State legislatures and local school boards became forums for contentious disputes over how schools deal with the teaching of history, race, and gender. School libraries came under pressure to remove books some parents found objectionable.

From a review of state and local laws, rules and orders, The Washington Post has reported that “three-fourths of the nation’s school-age students are now educated under state-level measures that either require more teaching on issues like race, racism, history, sex and gender, or which sharply limit or fully forbid such lessons.” Most of the legal restrictions were enacted in states won by former Republican President Donald Trump in 2020, while states won by Democratic President Joe Biden required or expanded lessons on such topics.

Along with other Republican-ruled states, the North Carolina General Assembly, with a GOP veto-proof majority in 2023, adopted procedures and subsidies to facilitate parents’ choice to enroll their children in charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling, instead of traditional public schools. Even before the 2023 session, these three sectors had gained students. Over the past 10 years, enrollment in public charter schools rose by 180%, private schools 32%, and homeschools 74%, according to BEST NC.

A public school enrollment dip cannot be fully explained, however, by parents exercising a choice of an alternative to a traditional public school. Record-low birth rates have diminished the current pool of school-aged children. In North Carolina, as BEST NC reports, the school-aged population represented 19% of the total population of the state in 2021, down from 21% in the U.S. Census of 2000.

“Recent data show more than a third of the public school enrollment losses cannot be explained by corresponding gains in private school and homeschool enrollment or by demographic change,” says a report by the Brookings Institution and the Hamilton Project. “Dropping out of school and chronic truancy as potential contributors to this phenomenon are bound to have developmental, academic, and economic consequences for the affected children.”

To merge, or not? To consolidate, or not?

On March 11, the Asheville City Schools Board voted 5-2 to close a middle school with 220 students. Beginning in fall 2024, the district will have a single middle school that currently has 543 students, in a facility with a capacity of 1,000. Asheville Superintendent Maggie Fehrman previously said that the district had 600 fewer students enrolled than it did 10 years ago.

The decision to close the “beloved Montford Avenue school,” the Asheville Citizen Times reported, “left many fleeing the boardroom in tears.”

Eight days later, the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners voted 5-1 to appropriate $300,000 for a study of the feasibility of merging the Asheville City schools with the county schools district. In doing so, the county commission responded grudgingly to a mandate from the state legislature, which had attached the study provision to an unrelated bill in September 2023. Results from the study are due in early 2025.

Now, Asheville and Buncombe counties serve as a microcosm of post-pandemic pressures on local education governance. Whether to close schools or to merge districts involves interlocking issues, many of which bear on the day-to-day sensibilities and lives of students, teachers, administrators, and parents.

The issues include the distance of daily school bus travel; the role of a school in neighborhood-community identity; hiring and possible dismissal of teachers and staff; the racial, ethnic, and economic-status profile of a school; budgetary implications; and athletic loyalties.

The Asheville-Buncombe enrollment patterns illustrate the state’s modern ethnic diversity. Asheville City Schools has 2,450 white, 697 Black, and 346 Hispanic students. The larger Buncombe district has 14,273 white, 1,542 Black, and 4,685 Hispanic students.

No other county has a similar legislative mandate to consider consolidating. But several counties are dealing with closings, mergers, and shifting of students:

• Person County Schools is closing an elementary school by shifting students in third, fourth, and fifth grade to another campus. The process also includes the further development of the K-12 laboratory school – Carolina Community Academy – in collaboration with the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The lab school opened in 2022, with students being added to its enrollment in stages over three years.
• A year ago, the Martin County Board of Education merged the athletic programs of two high schools. Then in May, the board decided to merge the two schools completely in the 2024-25 academic year.
• Through a process dubbed a “demerger,’’ starting in the 2024-25 school year, approximately 1,700 students living on the Edgecombe County side of the city of Rocky Mount will move from Nash County Schools to enroll in Edgecombe County Public Schools.
• In Craven County last fall, the school district received four scenarios from its consultant on assigning attendance zones. Of the four options, three would result in closing at least one school. The school board voted not to accept those options.
• Cherokee County serves as an illustration of community tensions that arise from plans for school mergers and closures. The Board of County Commissioners has voted to evict its school district administration from county office space in August and to deprive the school system of $1.2 million in local sales tax revenue. The commissioners’ actions come in the wake of the school board’s decision to reorganize three schools in Cherokee County, moving students from one school to another but without closing existing campuses. Meanwhile, the board’s vice chair has proposed a plan, uncertain of adoption, that would close six schools while adding a new school and rebuilding two high schools.

After waves of consolidation, two decades of stability

For the past 20 years, North Carolina has had 115 school districts — all 100 counties have a county-based district; 11 counties also have one or two city- or town-based districts. The prevalence of countywide districts is the product of two waves of consolidation in the 20th Century.

The first wave swelled after World War I, when “the strategy of school consolidation — with the goal of improving the quality of the state’s rural public schools — began to gain momentum in the North Carolina legislature and among local school boards,” says the Encyclopedia of North Carolina. “The one- and two-teacher schools serving rural districts were incapable of competing economically with the larger facilities of towns and cities, and rural children were suffering the consequences.”

The second wave flowed sporadically through the last four decades of the 20th century, driven largely by the argument that the state should have to fund only one administrative unit per county but also by a recognition that a single-county district would provide a better platform on which to devise desegregation plans. Moreover, the school consolidations of the major urban counties surely have contributed to their attractiveness as places to live and work — as well as enhanced their ability to respond to growth.

In a recent paper for the national Civil Rights Project, researchers at N.C. State University wrote, “The North Carolina State Legislature created a favorable context for mergers through state support and incentives. Although endorsement of consolidation was rooted primarily in educational advancement and efficiency in governance, creating city-county districts was also beneficial to the success of desegregation plans.”

As a 2019 report from the Center for Racial Equity in Education (CREED) recalls, early desegregation plans in North Carolina and across the South closed formerly all-black schools, with their students transferred more than white students and with black principals and educators losing jobs.

“Black communities repeatedly had to sacrifice their leadership traditions, school cultures, and educational heritage for the other benefits of desegregation,” historian David Cecelski said in the report.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools district resulted from a 1960 merger. Wake County and Raleigh City schools merged in the mid-1970s. Guilford County unified in 1993. As a result, Wake with 159,000 students and CMS with 140,000 students rank among the top 20 nationally in enrollment. Guilford ranks at or near 50th.

In 2007, state Sen. Tony Rand, a powerful Democrat known for savvy budget-writing, introduced legislation to push all counties to consolidate. Rand, who died in 2020, proposed to provide state funding to only one school district per county. His legislation renewed debate on consolidation, but did not pass.

From 2007 to 2009, a civic association known as Davidson Vision conducted a research project to prepare for a merger of Davidson County’s three school systems — should a bill like Rand’s become law. The study concluded that a merger would cost the county millions in state and federal funding, including Title I assistance for low-income students.

In a recent email, Dr. E. Lewis Phillips Jr., an author of the Davidson Vision research who has served on the Lexington City Schools board of education, offered takeaway lessons from the study: that necessary debates on education issues “will be overshadowed by the singular focus of school merger,” and that the cost will lead to an outcry that “it’s too expensive, we can’t afford it.”

In addition, Phillips said: “We must ask how we value education in our community in the face of an economy that increasingly depends upon a more educated workforce to thrive.”

In 2017-18, a joint House-Senate committee, with a Republican majority, examined deconsolidation — specifically whether the major urban districts had grown too large. The committee issued a report, but ultimately took no definite position.

Also in 2018, the Columbus County Board of Commissioners authorized a feasibility study of merging Whiteville City Schools and Columbus County Schools. The study was conducted by former state Superintendent of Public Instruction June Atkinson and former Department of Public Instruction (DPI) Chief Fiscal Officer Phillip Price.

In a report with findings similar in several respects to the Davidson study, Atkinson and Price wrote:

“Based on extensive analysis of funding sources, expenditures, and other factors, it is calculated that the public schools in Columbus County will lose approximately $1,039,297 of State revenue after two years if the two school districts are merged. The loss of these State funds would be in the areas of classroom teachers, career-technical education, school administration, children with special needs, limited English speakers, and central office staff.”

This 2010 report by AASA, the School Superintendents’ Association, looks at the benefits and costs of school district consolidation.

Strong state with weak links

The North Carolina Constitution declares that the General Assembly “shall provide by taxation and otherwise for a general and uniform system of free public schools.” It’s a challenging mandate in a sprawling state of geographic, demographic, and community diversity.

No county or school district is entirely “typical;” each has its own history, differences, loyalties, strengths, and weaknesses.

The state demographer projects that North Carolina will grow by 3.5 million people, largely from in-migration, by 2050.

Growth of such scale over the next 25 years suggests that the state will continue to have, and increase, the capacity to rebound from the pandemic and to provide the fundamental public education envisioned in its constitution.  

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