Denver Public Schools once billed itself as the “fastest-growing urban district in the United States.”

A decade ago, DPS was in the midst of a rebirth. Enrollment swelled by thousands of students and new schools opened across the city as the district became renowned for controversial reforms that included closing low-performing schools.

But as DPS leaders touted the district’s rise, they also were realizing it was coming to an end.

The school district’s rapid growth began to falter after it added nearly 15,000 new students between 2008 and 2014. By 2015, records show, district leaders expressed concerns that falling birth rates and Denver’s high housing prices could lead to declining enrollment growth.

Now, following three consecutive years of falling enrollment, DPS administrators and board members are faced with a potential $9 million budget shortfall after the district failed to aggressively respond to trends its leaders had anticipated.

“We’ve known about this for a long time,” Scott Baldermann, a school board member elected in 2019, said of the downward enrollment trend. “From what I can tell, the district did not take this (enrollment) data into account.”

Today, 6,543 fewer elementary-aged children attend DPS schools than at that age group’s peak in 2014, and middle schoolers are declining, too. Yet the number of schools operated by DPS has largely stayed the same, despite the district’s per-pupil funding falling along with enrollment.

For students still in Denver classrooms, this means larger class sizes and fewer electives, such as art courses, and after-school activities.

Just how DPS will fully address the problem remains unclear. Superintendent Alex Marrero last fall proposed closing 10 schools, but the district’s Board of Education rejected the plan even after it was narrowed to just two — and then rescinded its 2021 resolution that had directed the superintendent to come up with a consolidation plan.

Marrero told The Denver Post last week he plans to hold community meetings for families of students at those two schools — Denver Discovery School and Math and Science Leadership Academy — and, in April, may once again ask the board to close them.

The Post interviewed current and former district employees and Board of Education members who all acknowledged DPS has too many schools. But they disagreed on whether that problem exists because the district opened too many or closed too few in the face of slowing enrollment.

“Even though (the school board) inherited some of these problems, it’s absolutely one of the top problems they should be paying attention to,” said former Lt. Gov. Barbara O’Brien, who served on the Denver school board from 2013 to 2021. “It’s almost like board governance malpractice. Their job is to manage a healthy budget and deal with shortfalls.”

But board Vice President Auon’tai Anderson, elected in 2019, said the consequences of falling enrollment should have been addressed years ago.

“Why didn’t we start these conversations in 2014?” he said.

Anderson, who led the board’s vote against school closures in November, said he ultimately isn’t against shutting down schools. But conversations with families need to happen sooner in the process so they have time to understand why it must be done — something he said DPS didn’t do enough of when it was opening and closing schools during the reform years.

“Our communities are, unfortunately, still hurting by the closures so many years ago,” he said, adding, “We’ve had to fix their mistakes, where we’ve had to put communities back together because they divided them.”

Those who spoke to The Post said the district’s response to falling enrollment was hindered by repeated turnover in superintendents, a teachers strike and the flipping of the school board’s majority, all of which happened within the past five years.

It didn’t help that during the same year enrollment dropped for the first time in 15 years, a major public health crisis shuttered schools and moved learning online.

“It was a bit of a perfect storm,” said Rob Gould, president of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association.

But perhaps most of all, they said, DPS’s story is also a story about Denver, of how the city has changed, its population has shifted, and how — despite their attempts — administrators couldn’t predict just how expensive it would become to live here.

A growing district and warning signs

DPS enrollment rose by nearly 18,000 students between 2008 and 2019, a period in which the district also saw significant growth in the number of schools it operated.

The district enrolled 74,176 children and operated 142 schools when its expansion took off in 2008. When enrollment peaked at 92,112 students in 2019, the district ran 206 schools — 64 more than it had 11 years earlier, according to an analysis of state data by The Post.

Despite enrollment dropping in the past three years, the number of schools in the district has stayed roughly the same. As of 2022, the district operated 202 schools and taught 87,864 students, according to data from the Colorado Department of Education.

This trend is most notable in schools serving elementary students, which have experienced the largest declines for the longest period of time.

Enrollment among elementary-aged children began falling after 2014, but the number of schools serving the group has largely remained flat. In fact, DPS operated 114 schools serving elementary students in 2022, four more than in 2014. And yet there are 6,543 fewer elementary students enrolled than were eight years ago, state data shows.

The Post reviewed enrollment and school data from DPS and Colorado’s education department going back to 2003. The state counts how many students are enrolled in every district each October and that number is used to determine how much funding schools receive. The Post included pre-K students in its count of elementary-aged children.

The Post also examined copies of DPS’s Strategic Regional Analysis reports for the years 2010 to 2022. The reports, which were obtained through an open records request, provide annual enrollment projections and development plans.

DPS leaders knew by 2015 that various factors, including falling birth rates, had the potential to curtail the district’s expansion, the documents show.

For years, the district’s growth had hinged on its ability to bring more Denver children — many of whom might have once attended school elsewhere — into DPS classrooms.

But by 2015, staff believed they were reaching the “ceiling.” They knew not every child in the city would attend school in DPS; there would always be some who choose to attend schools in other districts or private schools, or were homeschooled, according to the documents.

Two years later, DPS officials were considering the possibility of enrollment declining by 2020 — a prediction that came true.

“This should have been a higher priority years before 2019,” Baldermann said.

Those leading the district during its heyday, including former Superintendent Tom Boasberg, said it wasn’t so simple.

The first signs that enrollment was stalling only popped up in part of the city: northwest Denver. At the same time, enrollment was booming across town, creating a need for new schools in neighborhoods like Green Valley Ranch and Central Park.

Instead, former DPS employees and board members said the district hasn’t closed enough schools in recent years, particularly in areas where there are fewer children.

“It wasn’t really dealt with,” said Boasberg, who stepped down in 2018 after nearly a decade at the district’s helm.

“Denver as a city was really hot”

The way Parker Baxter tells it, DPS had a choice: The district could continue to view school choice as a threat or could it use it as an opportunity. It chose the latter.

Under Colorado law, families can ask to attend any public school in the state for free, even in other districts.

Unlike other states, most charter schools in Colorado are also part of a local district, so children attending them in Denver are still enrolled in DPS, Baxter said.

DPS had shunned school choice in the 1990s, even challenging the constitutionality of a provision in Colorado’s Charter Schools Act. The case rose all the way to the state’s highest court and questioned whether the State Board of Education could order a local school board to approve a charter school application it previously had rejected. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled in 1999 that the provision was constitutional.

But almost a decade later, as charter schools were becoming more prevalent, DPS had to decide how to respond, said Baxter, who served as director of charter schools for DPS from 2008 to 2011.

In 2007, DPS switched strategies, a decision that kicked off years of expansion as it implemented policies that included simplifying the process through which students apply to other schools within DPS, evaluating school performance, closing low-performing schools, and replacing or creating new schools.

In the mid-2000s, DPS was only the second-largest school district in Colorado and enrolled just over 70,000 students.

Many of the city’s children were opting to attend schools in neighboring districts or private schools and it was a problem DPS officials once estimated cost them not only thousands of students, but millions of dollars.

“They were going to do everything they could do to turn that around,” said Van Schoales, senior policy director at Keystone Policy Center, a Colorado nonprofit. “They did that through opening new schools and new programs and phasing out programs in schools that weren’t working.”

It wasn’t long before DPS went from losing children to other districts to gaining students.

Since 2007, DPS has opened about 65 new schools and more than 30 others have been restarted or replaced, according to a study by the University of Colorado Denver’s Center for Education Policy Analysis. (Baxter is now the director of the center and authored the study.)

The district’s growth was heavily tied to the redevelopment of Denver, especially the rapid building of homes in the city’s Central Park, Lowry and Green Valley Ranch neighborhoods.

“Denver as a city was really hot,” said Brian Eschbacher, who formerly served as both the district’s director of planning and analysis and as executive director of planning and choice. “The whole city was growing.”

With new homes came families and the need for more schools. But different neighborhoods had different needs and wants.

In Lowry, for example, developers recruited private schools into the neighborhood and there wasn’t as much collaboration with DPS or the charter schools in the system, Schoales said.

However, in Central Park, the first schools to open were charter schools, he said.

“The attention that was being given to the instructional design of these schools was much greater than had been done in the past,” he said.

Charter schools opening in those neighborhoods had the same enrollment boundaries as a district-run school so they functioned alike, Boasberg said.

“For us, governance really wasn’t important,” he said, adding that the district heard the same from families. “What they wanted was a great school for their kids.”

DPS leaders believed that by improving school performance, they could draw students living in some of Denver’s fastest-growing neighborhoods back to the district, documents show.

For example, families in northeast Denver were choosing to have their children attend schools in other parts of the city or to “avoid DPS schools altogether,” according to the district’s 2010 Strategic Regional Analysis report

Five years later, more children were living and going to school in northeast Denver and DPS was projecting the number of students there would continue to increase through 2020.

Birth rates fall

As DPS grew into Colorado’s largest school district — a milestone it reached in 2014 — two things changed Denver’s population in a way that would dampen its growth.

The district’s first problem was the fact that Denverites were — and still are — having fewer babies. Citywide, the student-aged population in Denver peaked in 2016, according to state data.

DPS leaders knew at least by 2015 that falling birth rates might affect enrollment in the district, documents show.

“That part we saw coming; we knew they were coming,” Eschbacher said.

One of the biggest reasons births have fallen statewide is because teen pregnancies have dropped, an achievement public health officials long have attributed to increased access to long-term birth control.

The Great Recession of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic also delayed births, but, generally, more people are waiting until they are older and in their 30s before having babies, Colorado state demographer Elizabeth Garner said.

The drop in births means there just aren’t as many children as there used to be and this is causing populations across the metro area to shift, Garner said.

And it’s affecting school districts beyond DPS. In Douglas County, for example, the population is heavy with members of Generation X, people born between 1965 and 1980.

As with Denver, the shift in Douglas County’s population is tied to real estate. In the 1990s, residential development took off in Douglas County. This also happened to be the time that many Gen Xers were in their 20s and 30s and of an age to buy a home, Garner said.

But now this poses a problem for the Douglas County School District, because many of those Gen Xers are in their 50s, not having babies and not moving. They’re aging in place, she said.

Now, the Douglas County School District is preparing to close schools in about three years. But, like Denver has done, the school district is also planning to build new ones, because it’s growing in areas with newer residential development, Superintendent Erin Kane said during a school board meeting last month.

What was harder for DPS leaders to understand in the mid-2010s was just how much redevelopment in certain parts of Denver would affect enrollment.

A drop in births takes about five years to impact districts because, eventually, fewer kindergarteners will enroll in schools.

But there isn’t a precise way to look at home prices and tell that, if they rise a certain amount, then it will change how many children are living in a neighborhood, Eschbacher said.

Denver was changing, its population shifting

DPS officials knew by 2014 that the redevelopment taking place in northwest Denver, notably in the Highlands, wouldn’t prove as fruitful for the district as the building taking place in the northeast, documents show.

It would, in fact, become a major problem for the district as many of the families moving into the Northside lacked what the district needed: children.

What happened with the district’s elementary schools shows just how much things changed for the DPS in this part of the city.

Elementary schools in northwest Denver were so filled with students that in 2012 the district was weighing the potential need for new “offerings” in the region.

By 2021, at least two of the schools — Eagleton and Cowell elementaries — that were at capacity nine years earlier would become under-enrolled and recommended for closure. Eagleton faced the possibility of closing a second time a year later because of low enrollment.

A similar story took place in southwest Denver, Eschbacher said.

“Many of the schools that we opened down there, they filled up,” he said. “There was a period where every seat was taken. I don’t think we opened too many schools at that peak enrollment period.”

But now, Eschbacher said, DPS has lost thousands of elementary-aged students

“We have been declining for all these years and they haven’t closed any (schools),” he said.

One of the biggest differences between the development in Denver’s northeast neighborhoods and those in the northwest was the type of housing built.

In the northwest, newer projects turned single-family detached homes into apartments, townhomes and condos. These types of builds often house fewer children than the single-family homes built in places like Green Valley Ranch and Central Park, according to the district’s planning reports.

One report showed an aerial image of a single city block in northwest Denver that transformed from having 22 residential units with 13 DPS students in 2005 to having 48 units with four students in 2014.

The same report pointed out another troubling trend: Colorado’s home prices had jumped almost 10% between February 2014 and February 2015. At the time, the increase was the highest in the nation, and in March 2015 the average Denver home cost $354,580.

Home prices have increased even more dramatically since then. The median price of a single-family home in metro Denver was $595,000 last month.

Soaring rents and home prices exacerbated the problem in northwest Denver so not only were fewer families with children moving into the Northside but they also were getting pushed out.

The problem spread across the city and, except for San Francisco, Denver saw more widespread gentrification than any other U.S. metro area between 2013 and 2017, according to a study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition in Washington, D.C.

DPS’s planning reports show that district officials knew high housing prices were going to curtail enrollment gains, but Eschbacher said prices surpassed their predictions.

“The speed and the rate of housing price increases was so high,” Eschbacher said. “It was beyond what many urban planners could have forecasted at that point.”

Nationwide the gentrification of cities brought significant changes in who lived in their neighborhoods, and Denver was no exception.

Denver saw one of the biggest influxes in the U.S. of white residents between 2010 and 2020, according to a recent report by The Washington Post.

As Denver’s population shifted, so did the students in its schools.

Latino students only made up 52% of DPS’ student population in 2021, down from 58% in 2012. But the percentage of white students rose from 20% to 25% during the same period. Enrollment among Black students remained steady, according to the district’s 2022 planning report.

Students also became more affluent. More than 70% of DPS students qualified for free-or-reduced lunch in 2012, compared to the 59% who qualified in 2021, according to the report.

“The writing was clearly on the wall”

DPS is not alone in struggling with plunging enrollment. Districts across the U.S. are emerging from the pandemic and finding that they are facing another crisis.

Jeffco Public Schools‘ board voted in November to close 16 elementary schools in neighboring Jefferson County. Most of that closures will occur later this year.

Jeffco has been losing students for decades, but the district punted the decision to close schools until the school board realized “the ship (was) sinking,” said Schoales, with the Keystone Policy Center.

“DPS is in a similar situation now, but people don’t seem to really grasp what the implications are,” he said.

Marrero, DPS’ superintendent, said in response to emailed questions that his predecessors began addressing falling enrollment once “they started to see huge dips in the number of children born in certain Denver neighborhoods back in 2015.”

He pointed to the district’s Strengthening Neighborhoods Initiative, which resulted in a committee of educators and community members presenting a series of recommendations to the school board in 2017. The committee recommended that the district create new enrollment zones, increase access to transportation and develop a “transparent school consolidation process.”

DPS representatives did not answer The Post’s question about what actions the district took in response to the 2017 recommendations.

Boasberg, the former superintendent who stepped down in 2018, said the district tried to use enrollment zones to address declining enrollment in schools by combining areas that were growing with those with fewer students.

In 2018, DPS announced for the first time in years that it wasn’t calling for any specific new schools to be built and began pulling back on its policy of closing schools with low test scores.

“The writing was clearly on the wall that additional consolidation would need to be necessary,” Boasberg said.

Former school board directors said they were trying to address slowing enrollment, most notably passing the now-rescinded 2021 resolution directing the district to work with schools and families on consolidating schools.

But, they noted, after the board majority flipped in 2019 and members backed by the teacher’s union took the helm, the new leadership opposed the district’s earlier reform policies and is hesitant to close schools.

“It’s now in their hands as the governing body of this district,” said Anne Bye Rowe, who served on the board from 2011 to 2019.

“This isn’t just a math problem. This is actually (about) trying to create environments that will serve our kids well,” she said, adding, “Closing or consolidating schools is one of the hardest things a board member will have to vote on and a district will have to implement.”

But two current board members — Baldermann and Anderson — said previous district leaders should have done more sooner.

“The boards of the past did not pass down a plan to us,” Anderson said, adding, “The district is at a place where we have to consider drastic options because the boards that came before us did not prepare us adequately for this moment now.”

Financial stress on DPS

Overall enrollment has now fallen for three consecutive years and DPS officials expect the trend to continue for the foreseeable future.

If nothing changes, the district could run a deficit — meaning it spends more money than it brings in through tax revenue and other sources — at least through the 2025-26 fiscal year.

While the looming $9 million shortfall is a small portion of DPS’s billion-dollar budget, Marrero already has warned that the district may have to dip into reserves and potentially close one or more schools this year simply because they don’t have enough students or employees to keep their buildings open.

“When you have a compounding decline over many, many years — five years or more — then you are in a situation where you are putting financial stress on the situation,” said Chuck Carpenter, the district’s chief financial officer.

Small schools have less money, meaning they don’t have the same access to electives as their peers in larger schools. Class sizes are also more likely to be larger and children from different grades are merged into a single class or instruction that is normally taught in Spanish is combined with classes taught in English, according to the district.

“We could continue to have schools with low enrollment,” Marrero said. “But small schools will continue to have staffing challenges and will not be able to offer as many educational programs, such as art, physical education and after-school activities, as schools that are fully enrolled.”

The list of 10 schools Marrero recommended for closure in the fall is still the same, he said.

Baldermann and Anderson were the only school board members who agreed to speak to The Post on the record about the district’s declining enrollment.

Board President Xóchitl “Sochi” Gaytán declined to be interviewed, but issued a statement.

“Confronting declining enrollment is a priority of the Board of Education,” she said. “Currently, the district is preparing to meet with potentially impacted school communities to collect information from those families.”

Anderson said the board needs to finish reviewing its governing policies before discussing school closures again. The policies have been at the crux of infighting among directors for almost a year as they disagree on how to govern. Directors began holding meetings late last year to review and set new policies and goals.

“We have to have policy to dictate where to go,” Anderson said. “We can’t hold the superintendent accountable to things that we’re not writing down and putting to paper.”

Board members want to find ways to address declining enrollment so that students of color and those from families with low incomes aren’t the ones bearing the brunt of school closures, Baldermann said.

Perhaps, he said, the board will look at changing school boundaries or ways to make school choice more equitable.

Consolidation needs to be based on “more values-driven vs. data-driven decisions,” Baldermann said. “What is going to benefit the district as a whole?”

When asked why that conversation didn’t take place before Marrero made his school closure recommendation in the fall, Baldermann said: “It should have.”

Enrollment in Denver schools falls after years of expansion

Denver Public Schools experienced years of rapid growth that began in 2008, enrolling thousands more students and opening new schools. But by 2017, DPS leaders were projecting enrollment to decline by 2020 — a prediction that came true as falling birth rates and neighborhood gentrification altered the city’s demographics.

Denver Post digital producer Kevin Hamm contributed to this story.

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