School enrollment is falling in New Jersey. In this post, I’ll break down NJ’s K-12 enrollment trends by county and school district using the NJ Department of Education’s Fall Enrollment Reports, as official a source as it gets. I’ll show you what is happening to enrollment, but not why it’s happening (beyond brief speculation). Answering why would require much more space and effort.
Unfortunately, there’s no single spreadsheet with data for every year, so I made one. NJ really needs to prioritize high quality public data, because its open data site leaves a lot to be desired.
Please note that in this post I exclude pre-school enrollment. Most school districts in NJ don’t offer Pre-K, and many that do only recently started. Comparing enrollment in a district with Pre-K to one without would be bad. Looking at a district’s enrollment over time, it’d be unclear why it grew: Because of more kids, or because they added a grade?
Also note that I include charter schools that report their enrollment to NJ DOE. For brevity, I’ll refer to all schools here as “public schools,” so just remember that I don’t just mean traditional public schools, but all publicly funded schools.
Finally, you might notice decimals in the enrollment counts because they’re full-time equivalent. A half-day kindergartner is counted as 0.5 full-time students.
State
New Jersey is gaining people but losing kids. Our overall population grew 5.7% from 2010 to 2020, according to the US Census, but our number of school-age children (5-17 years old) fell 1.2%. To wit, public K-12 enrollment shrank by 2.8%, almost 38,000 kids, over the last 10 academic years since Fall 2012. And as a sign of things to come, NJ’s number of kids under 5 years old fell 7.2%. (Note: This group shrank in all states but one.)
Breaking enrollment down by year, we see it fell even before the Pandemic, albeit very slowly. From Fall 2012 to Fall 2019, we lost 7,159 K-12 kids, a mere 1% drop with minuscule ups and downs in between. The Pandemic year, 2020-21, of course, saw the largest enrollment drop, and we still haven’t recovered.
I don’t have private or home school data, so I can’t tell exactly how much of the public school enrollment decline is due to that versus other trends like falling birth rates, migration, dropouts, and Kindergarten opt-outs. In any case, you’ll hear a lot about certain private schools growing a lot, but even if private and home schools didn’t exist, NJ’s public school enrollment would still have fallen. Our state simply has fewer kids in it.
Sidenote: Homeschooling
According to the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, New Jersey is 1 of just 9 states that don’t require parents to notify the government that they’re homeschooling, and the only East Coast state to do so. It actually looks like parents are required to do so under specific, rare circumstances: 1) Their local school district refuses to enroll their kid, or 2) the parent removes an already-enrolled student from high school.
No one knows how many kids are homeschooled in NJ; we only have rough estimates from surveys. 22 states assess homeschooled students’ academic progress, and most of NJ’s neighbors conduct “thorough” assessment; NJ does zero assessment.
In the current session of NJ’s state legislature, the only pending bills regarding homeschooling are about tax credits and a brief “Homeschool Parent’s Bill of Rights” that would establish parents “sole authority over the child’s curriculum.”
Altogether, these facts don’t inspire confidence that we’re conducting basic oversight of homeschooling in NJ. Here’s a homeschool graduate on her experience of moving from Pennsylvania to New Jersey (forgive me for the extra long quote, but it’s compelling):
My kindergarten through eighth grade experience [in Pennsylvania] provided me a mostly balanced, interesting, and engaging homeschool program. Every year, we submitted a portfolio to our licensed evaluator.
[…]
In New Jersey, things fell apart. Without oversight, there was no need to think about compiling a portfolio. Without state standards, there was no benchmark for my progress. We still tried to follow the Pennsylvania guidelines for high school […] but no one was there to check up on us or offer help as I entered harder subjects. I spent one entire academic year with my geometry book propped up on my dresser, open to the same page. By this time, our homeschooling friends had sucked us into a culture that told us girls’ education wasn’t valuable anyway, that I should be learning homemaking skills and preparing for a life of obedience to my husband. (We would never have been exposed to these ideas if we hadn’t joined a homeschooling group—we were ordinary, moderate Christians when I was in kindergarten.) Homeschooling had become a moral mission for my mother, such that putting me in public or private school was no longer an option—even if it meant I did nothing instead. My expected graduation date passed and I became suicidal. I was convinced that I was stupid and a failure for not being able to teach myself geometry or chemistry out of a book.
[Emphasis mine.]
~ Caitlin T. via the Coalition for Responsible Home Education
It’s interesting that we’re not considering a bill of rights for homeschool children, just one for parents. It’s as if homeschooling can be abused to dominate and neglect kids, so the state might want to protect children somewhat.
I can’t even tell if we have any kind of children’s bill of rights in NJ. The State Senate’s 2008-09 session had a bill that didn’t go anywhere. These law firms speak as if a codified law exists, but I can’t find any approved legislation. The NJ Department of Children and Families has a Youth Bill of Rights for kids in the foster system, but again, no legislation. Please tell me if I’m wrong.
This “sidenote” almost went longer than the rest of this post, but it’s an important topic. For more info, see the Coalition for Responsible Home Education’s policy recommendations and John Oliver’s segment on homeschooling.
Sidenote: Oops
In 2022 Michael Symons (now with the NJ Office of the Attorney General) wrote a piece for NJ 101.5 on New Jersey’s enrollment trends, but his 2020-21 number seems mistaken. He says state total K-12 enrollment in 2020-21 was 1,297,127, but the NJ DOE’s 2020-21 Fall Enrollment Report, his source, says it was 1,306,004 (in sheet “State” calculate R21 - R4 - R5). I also can’t replicate his PK-12 number for that year with the same spreadsheet (sheet “State” cell R21).
I’m not trying to blast this guy. Just note that a major news source that you’ll find on Google has a suspect number and, as far as I can tell, the Pandemic enrollment plunge wasn’t quite as dramatic as their chart looks.
Though two of Symons’ numbers are wrong, his point stands. Enrollment fell by 24,812 (2%) from Fall 2019 to Fall 2020. That’s the biggest drop seen in the last decade, and 2020-21 had our lowest enrollment in 20 years.
Counties
So New Jersey has fewer kids and lower enrollment. Are any of its counties growing?
Only Union and Middlesex counties grew their public K-12 enrollment. Union in particular showed strong 5% growth. Generally, our more rural and exurban counties (those furthest from Philly or NYC) shrank the most.
Keep in mind that while enrollment fell in most counties, population grew in most. Hudson and Ocean counties grew much faster than the state overall, but both lost enrollment.
I can’t help but notice that enrollment grew–or shrank the slowest–in the Northeast Corridor counties. These are some of our most populous and well-connected areas, and families appear least likely to leave them.
School Districts
In this section, I’m going to mostly exclude the 62 charter schools that are considered their own school districts. When I think of a school district, I don’t usually think of a single charter school. Instead, I’ll highlight them briefly at the end. Many vocational and special ed schools are also their own districts, but they’re harder to consistently filter out, so I won’t here. Forgive me.
599 of New Jersey’s non-charter school districts had 11 academic years’ worth of data (2012-13 to 2022-23). Of those, 25% grew enrollment and 75% lost enrollment.
Here’s how enrollment changed for each district. Under District search “County Total” or “State Total” if you want those.
Of course, mostly small districts shrank or grew the most, with shore districts in particular shrinking quickly. Beyond those, notable to me are Hoboken, Lindenwold, Plainfield, Collingswood, and Bridgeton for having some of the strongest, double-digit growth. Many rich districts like Millburn, Summit, West Orange, and South Orange-Maplewood shrank, but Princeton and Haddonfield are noteworthy exceptions.
Then there’s Camden. In Fall 2012, Camden City School District had almost as many kids as Salem County and was one of the largest districts in the state. But in the last 10 years it shrank by more than half, from almost 11,000 students to just over 5,100. Any words I have for this wouldn’t be enough, and I’m sure actual educators and families in Camden can speak on it better than me, but I’ll just note the obvious: Camden has been, and continues to be, devastated.
Now consider NJ’s 10 largest (as of 2022-23) school districts:
Elizabeth and Edison’s school districts saw amazing, double-digit growth. Elizabeth SD is now the 2nd-largest. On the other hand, Toms River SD saw double-digit losses, despite Ocean County’s overall population growing faster than the state.
In Fall 2012, Jersey City’s school district was NJ’s 2nd-largest. Makes sense. JC is our 2nd-largest city. Well, as of Fall 2022, JC SD is NJ’s 4th-largest school district, behind Elizabeth and Paterson SDs, despite Paterson’s enrollment also shrinking in that time.
Sidenote: Charter School Districts
As a whole, charter school enrollment grew 96% in the last decade! (In the below table, under the District column, search “County Total.”) The largest one, North Star Academy in Newark, grew 186% alone.
Then there are odd cases like Paterson Charter School for Science and Technology. It reported 2 students in Fall 2022, down from 1,039 in Fall 2012. I don’t know how that’s possible, but there you go.
What To Do About It
I imagine many people will conclude from these trends that New Jersey, their county, and/or their town is too expensive for families. Since this is New Jersey, property taxes will get the most blame for our unaffordability. (And remember, property taxes affect renters, too. That’s why renters also get a property tax rebate.) However, I suggest also considering factors beyond taxes.
If you want rising school enrollment, you need more families to move to your district. Families want adequate and affordable housing, high quality schools, and affordable day care for kids too young for school. The latter two require adequate budgets; the first can help stabilize taxes.
I’ll spare you a long housing spiel. There’s a nationwide housing shortage and NJ is in high demand. “Adequate” housing for a family means, to me, at least 3 bedrooms. In my experience, it’s difficult to find apartments or condos of this size in high demand areas. Towns suppress the construction of 3-bedroom apartments on purpose because certain residents want lower enrollment out of a shortsighted desire for low taxes and low density. On the other hand, single-family houses are scarce and have fiscal and environmental issues.
Most districts don’t provide pre-school, and few can afford to without state aid. It’s up to the state to prioritize and fund universal pre-school. To their credit the Murphy administration is working toward a goal of tuition-free, public pre-school for all 3- and 4-year olds.
Future Work
Maybe in a future post I will:
Zoom in on a few individual counties and their districts
Compare NJ to other states
Look back further than 2012
Cover pre-school enrollment.
Map enrollment change by school district? It’d be huge and interactive by necessity.
Official sources say nationwide public school enrollment grew in the 10 academic years between Fall 2011 and Fall 2021, but that includes Pre-K and isn’t as recent as the NJ DOE’s data.
I’d like to dig into Jersey City’s data to figure out exactly what’s going on. E.g., did a bunch of new charter districts break away? Did the city lose school-age kids? How many family-sized, 3-bedroom housing units did they build?