Snapshot: Somerville School Enrollment Numbers

Somerville is planning to invest more in its schools in the upcoming fiscal year. At a budget presentation earlier in June, Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone requested $56.6 million for the city's public school system for fiscal-year 2014, which begins July 1. That's a 7 percent increase over the previous year.

Likewise, the fiscal-year 2013 school budget saw a 6.91 percent increase over fiscal-year 2012 budget.

Part of the reasoning, according to the mayor's presentation, delivered on June 4, is that school enrollment numbers are projected to increase over the next decade after spending much of the previous decade decreasing.

Below is a look at Somerville's school enrollment numbers over the past 10 years, taken from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

As you can see, overall enrollment numbers decreased every year until the 2010-2011 school year, when they started to tick up again. The mayor's budget presentation projected an enrollment of about 5,378 in the 2021-2022 school year.

The total numbers tell part of the story. Below is a table of Somerville public school enrollment numbers for each grade, pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, over the previous 10 years.

You can see the number of kids, by grade, in the school system in each year.

You can also see there are more kindergarteners and first-graders in the system now than at any point in the past decade.

Another fun thing to do is to start with one class of students—say, the kindergarten class of 2003-2004—and follow that class' enrollment numbers through the years. With this example, the kindergarten class of 2003-2004 is the first grade class of 2004-2005, the second-grade class of 2005-2006, etc.

Even now, there seems to be an attrition rate from grade to grade, with a handful of families, for whatever reason, leaving the school system each year.

Every year, if you follow one class of students from grade to grade, there's a jump in enrollment from 8th grade to 9th grade, and then an almost equally dramatic drop in enrollment from 9th grade to 10th grade. However, it seems the attrition rate has been decreasing over the past few years.

Behind the numbers, no doubt, are highly personal stories. Parents get new jobs and move to new cities; young siblings  get old enough for school while older siblings head off to college or move out of the home; parents and kids make decisions about what school is best for them. Also, the population characteristics in a city like Somerville are always changing.