Report: AISD No Longer On Top 5 List Of Largest School Districts

EAST AUSTIN, TX -- The Austin Independent School District has dropped off the list of the state’s top five biggest districts in the wake of three straight years of enrollment declines.

Now in sixth place among big school districts, AISD has lost some at 3,000 students in the past two years, according to district data. The declines no longer place AISD among the state’s top five largest districts, the Austin American-Statesman noted.

To stem the tide, district board members previously approved spending $350,000 on a marketing campaign aimed at boosting student enrollment. It’s the second time for such a media campaign, the first such effort launched last June.

In shrinking, the school district defies explosive population growth surrounding it in one of the nation’s fastest-growing regions. Ironically, much of the decline is rooted in that very growth as gentrification continues pricing families out of their neighborhoods.

As a result of brisk commercial development, soaring property values spurred by such construction have driven many families from homes they can no longer afford. Many of those families head to outlying suburban districts where housing costs are lower.

The district’s most recent demographic report released Jan. 12 predicts even more declines in the next decade of 6,140 students--a 7.4 percent decline.

The gentrification-fueled exodus is most acutely felt central and east Austin, according to the report.

“We are becoming a much more divided district in some ways because of the cost of housing, especially in central and east,” Beth Wilson, the district’s assistant director of facility planning, told the Statesman. “It’s definitely the cost of housing.”

To a lesser extent, the district partially attributes student declines to lower birth rates.

The upshot: Over the next ten years, elementary level populations are expected to lose more than 2,700 student (a 6 percent decline) and another 2,100 students in middle schoool (a 13 percent drop). Declines since the 2013 school year have been seen primarly at the pre-K and kindergarten grade levels, the district notes in pushing the lower-birth-rate theory.

But it’s housing--both the lack of affordable versions for lower-income families and gentrification-created gains for those in a higher demographic--that figures most prominently as the reason for student declines.

“There are 68 known active and planned housing projects scattered throughout the district, yielding an estimated 11,337 new housing units over the next ten years,” the report notes.

“However, a recent shift in housing types from traditional single-family detached to condominiums, townhomes and apartments will not bode well for future student growth, as these residential types have not yielded large number of students in Austin ISD.”

A real-world case of gentrification-fueled displacement of students that stretched into the holiday season was seen last year, when Oracle Corp.’s move into a lower-income enclave forced the ouster of more than 100 students.

Some of the schoolchildren displaced by Oracle’s entry into the neighborhood were attending Metz Elementary--a school already expected to see a 43 percent student decline over the next ten years.

All told, at Lakeview Apartments (which has since been demolished so Oracle Corp. can build its corporate campus), 121 AISD students were displaced, including 72 at Metz Elementary, 21 at Martin Middle School and 28 at Eastside Memorial High School.

“We are becoming a much more divided district in some ways because of the cost of housing, especially in central and east,” Beth Wilson, the district’s assistant director of facility planning, told the Statesman. “That is having a much larger play in our story of reduced populations within central Austin. It’s definitely the cost of housing.”

In its report, AISD breaks down the numbers as to where previously enrolled students have gone for the 2015-16 school year: Neighboring districts, 47 percent; charter schools, 28.8 percent; private schools or leaving the state, 23.7 percent.

Aside from Metz, the elementary schools expected to sustain the greatest student enrollment losses as a result of that exodus are: Linder, with a projected ten-year decline of 43 percent; Brooke, 40 percent; Sanchez, 39 percent; Zavala, 34 percent; Ortega, 31 percent; Govalle, 30 percent; Blackshear, 28 percent; Zilker, 26 percent; and Ridgetop, 25 percent.

Read the district’s full report here: