Happy back to school! Have you seen the MCPS video? I haven’t seen fall enrollment numbers yet, but the projections are for continued declines and MCPS is warning us that peak enrollment is in the past. This post is about how those declines matter.
Declining birthrates are causing widespread enrollment declines nationally, including in MCPS. MCPS forecasts that by 2031, its enrollment will have fallen by 9 percent from its peak in 2019. Public school enrollment depends on more than birthrates: immigration, housing markets, homeschooling, and private schooling all matter. Recent events including the pandemic, local losses of federal jobs, and immigration enforcement efforts all affected MCPS enrollment, but even if Montgomery County somehow figures out how to make more jobs and more housing, the birthrates will still yield a major hit to enrollment going forward.
Enrollment affects revenues and spending, as well as school closures, boundaries, and consolidations.
Why does enrollment matter for revenues?
State and federal dollars are allocated through multiple programs, but they’re all based on enrollment in some way (e.g., per pupil, per economically disadvantaged pupil). MCPS gets the majority of its budget from Montgomery County, so it’s less fully exposed to that hit than many other districts.
Each year, MCPS asks the County Council for an amount equal to its estimated spending minus estimated state and federal revenue for the operating budget. As we saw this year, estimated needed spending is a fluid concept, but it does depend in large part on enrollment.
But when MCPS makes the ask, it’s for the bottom line, a single (large) dollar amount, not for a certain amount of dollars per pupil. If I were on the County Council, I would want to track the MCPS budget in per-pupil terms, not just total dollars.
Why does enrollment matter for spending?
The impact of enrollment declines on spending – and what students get in exchange – depends on how willing MCPS, the teachers’ union, and the public are to do things differently.
Consider an elementary school with one art teacher that loses 9 percent of its students and still has one art teacher. No one wants to lose an art teacher, but this adds up. There are ways to avoid these “rounding” cost increases, but they all look different than what people are used to. For example, MCPS could hire more part-time staff, or have more teachers split their time across schools. Some of the reduction in full-time positions can happen through staff attrition, but it could also require eliminating additional jobs.
Enrollment feeds into school utilization rates (enrollment/capacity), which are important for prioritizing capital budget decisions. MCPS has a long queue of overdue projects with very real consequences for students and staff in the buildings. While you can have an art teacher spend less than 100 percent of her time in a given school, HVAC, roofing, and other capital investments are not so easily scaled. MCPS made this point at the August 20 Board of Education meeting with this handy graphic:
Source: MCPS presentation on Opening Schools, accessed Aug. 24, 2026
Does enrollment decline mean MCPS and the Board of Education should close schools?
Closing schools is the third rail of school district politics, as anyone who saw the politics around what MCPS has termed the relocation of Wootton HS knows. Right up there with closures are consolidations; nobody likes those either. I assume MCPS and the Board will try hard to avoid closing and consolidating schools, but it seems like they don’t think they can avoid it – why else would we be headed into a countywide elementary and middle school closure and consolidation study this year?
The plan is to follow the closure and consolidation study with a countywide elementary and middle school boundary study. Think about the agony of last year’s boundary studies for only two high schools; the current study will be for MCPS’s 137 elementary and 40 middle schools. It’s going to be a lot, but it’s hard to disagree with Dr. Taylor’s memo that “Declining enrollment and uneven facility utilization present operational and fiscal challenges that warrant a comprehensive review of the school system’s facility portfolio.”
MCPS’s recent move to using a Facilities Condition Index to more fairly describe the needs of different buildings, instead of letting the squeakiest wheels get the capital budget grease, will help with the capital improvement plan, and with decisions about which buildings to close.
Source: https://ww2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/facilities/FCI/ accessed Aug. 11, 2026
None of this answers the question I posed: should they close schools? I don’t know, in part because I don’t know what the teachers’ union and the public would be willing to accept in exchange for avoiding it. Consider this thought experiment: would people stand for an elementary school where classroom teachers run specials like art and music themselves? Would the teachers’ union? While the boundary studies should produce helpful demographic projections, they won’t reveal what specific tradeoffs students, families, and staff are willing to make. I also don’t know about the geography, within MCPS, of enrollment decline and facilities health. That’s the kind of information the study should yield.
The political cost of closures depends not only on the closures, but on how people feel about the fairness of the process. This requires trust and transparency, both of which could use a boost in MCPS. (For all the transparency hawks following the potential Board handbook update I wrote about last month, the Board chose not to vote on the update and I haven’t seen anything since. The 2025-2026 handbook is still posted at the time of this writing.)
How can we all see the tradeoffs more clearly?
As an MCPS parent, MCCPTA delegate, and economist who has studied school finance for the last 25 years, I find the published MCPS budget documents insufficient for understanding how MCPS allocates resources. I know I’m not the only one. This is a problem for public trust and informed decision-making. Everyone should be able to understand where money is going inside the district and why.
Or, to speak the Board’s language and align with the strategic plan, there’s a problem with Goal 3, Objectives 11 and 12. Goal 3 is “Ensure a safe, welcoming, and inclusive learning and work environments through positive climate and effective operations.” [sic] Objective 11 is “Ensure communication is clear, culturally responsive, and easy to understand.” Objective 12 is “Operate with efficiency and transparency, ensuring the responsible and accountable use of public resources.” The Strategic Planning Scorecard below is designed to track progress on the goals, but the associated metrics don’t capture anything about public understanding of the budget.
Source: MCPS Strategic Plan 2025-2030, accessed Aug. 25, 2026
So how could we understand these budget tradeoffs better? One starting point would be to put all funding amounts in dollars per affected pupil, meaning per pupil experiencing the spending. So if it’s a K-5 curriculum, show spending per K-5 student; if it’s an athletic program, divide the cost by the number of students participating in it. The point isn’t to just choose whatever costs the least, but to make the very big numbers tossed around in budget discussions more interpretable and tradeoffs more visible.
This year I got my certificate in education finance through the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown. As part of the training, we played this budget hold ’em game. It provided per-pupil cost estimates of different options, which got players moving beyond talking about the financial costs associated with a budget item to talking about the opportunity costs of the ask. That is, if we fund one thing, what other thing do we give up? And how do we decide? We had really interesting (simulated) conversations in the training, and I’d love to hear more of them for real in MCPS.
There will be hard choices ahead, but they should at least be visible ones, based on information that allows comparisons of the actual tradeoffs. Opportunity costs are nothing new, but understanding them – and communicating them clearly to the public – is going to be more important as MCPS and the Board face increasingly hard decisions stemming from enrollment decline.
Pop quiz
The Strategic Plan Scorecard above reports a “56% Read rate for MCPS Weekly Parent Newsletter” [sic]. What reaction will no reader of this newsletter have to this?
a. What’s the denominator?
b. Define “read.”
c. I’m missing out on communications from MCPS?! Where do I sign up?
Answer key
c. If you are reading my newsletter (or you know there is a Strategic Planning Scorecard), I predict you already receive – if not read – that weekly MCPS newsletter, Things to Know.
Extra credit
This enrollment decline isn’t just an MCPS thing. Read Updating D.C.’s enrollment projections: Trends, methodology, and implications - D.C. Policy Center
Per-pupil costs went through the roof in severely under-enrolled Chicago schools (ProPublica).
Exit ticket
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