A few years ago, the question came: "Where are the kids?"
New Orleans' public school enrollment had dropped, startling charter leaders who district leaders had told to plan for the opposite.
Nine schools have closed since then, some due to low enrollment, while the district has shut down others for poor performance.
The issue resurfaced at last week's school board meeting during a now-yearly update. Except for a slight uptick this fall, enrollment is expected to keep declining, and there are already too many empty seats.
Since the district and state fund schools by the student and there are fixed costs, schools can eventually become too expensive to run as enrollment drops.
"It's a big problem," said Holly Reid, chief of policy and portfolio for the nonprofit New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO), which conducts the district's analysis.
Reid said nine schools have at least 20% of available seats empty. Systemwide, students fill closer to 90% of seats, but that's still shy of the district's 92% goal.
During the meeting, school board member Olin Parker asked Reid whether the district's target is too low and whether more schools should close.
She didn't answer but said that since enrollment is expected to keep declining, the district should regularly monitor the numbers and reassess its goals.
Parker said charter leaders want the district to respond to the issue and "move faster."
He encouraged the district's acting superintendent, Fateama Fulmore, to consider moving under-enrolled schools to smaller buildings, consolidating schools or making them share facilities.
Parker said the New Orleans public school community needs to act, and district and charter leaders should "stop waiting" for the other to respond.
Carlos Zervigon, another board member, said he agreed with Parker but added a note of caution.
He said there are significant risks when you move schools around and stressed that the district's higher-quality facilities aren't evenly distributed across the city.
If the board isn't careful, "We're gonna end up with neighborhoods that don't have a school," Zervigon said.
The district's five-year plan includes moving schools into better-quality facilities that are also the right size for them based on enrollment.
Reid said more than 11,500 students — about one in four — attend school in lower-quality buildings that need millions of dollars in repairs.
New dashboard
In 2016, a demography firm hired by the district predicted public school enrollment would continue to climb for the next decade, eventually recovering from its plummet after Hurricane Katrina.
Instead, it's fallen every year since, excluding a small bump this year.
Research points to falling birth rates and people moving out of the city due to living costs and, more recently, insurance premiums. Since 2017, public school enrollment has also been falling statewide.
In response to school leaders' concerns, Reid's team published its first enrollment analysis in 2022, followed by additional reports in 2023 and 2024.
The latest iteration is a new data dashboard. It's a publicly available joint project from NSNO and New Orleans Public Schools, and Reid said it will be updated throughout the year.
"We know there's a lot of uncertainty now," Reid said. "This can at least solidify and give answers to the things we know."
The dashboard includes information the Louisiana Department of Education collects on New Orleans schools. While the data is already publicly available, Reid said the tool's value is in its presentation and analysis.
It displays trend lines for individual schools and the district and allows users to compare up to four schools across dozens of measures.
While NSNO and the district developed the tool with their staff and charter leaders in mind, Reid thinks it will also be helpful for nonprofits that work with schools and media members.
Rafael Simmons, the district's chief accountability officer, said his team has already started using the dashboard to support its work.
Sabrina Pence, the CEO of FirstLine Schools, said data from NSNO helped her team close one of its PreK-8 schools in 2022.
"A dashboard like this one can certainly support similar decisions by providing transparent and accessible data," Pence said in an email.
While enrollment is crucial, she pointed to other important factors the tool also visualizes, like academic performance and finances.
Schools are in a vulnerable place now that federal funding from the pandemic has dried up, and some money they've long relied on is now in question under the Trump administration.
New Orleans schools are also facing a local funding crisis. Plus, a new voucher-like program launches next school year that could draw students to leave public schools statewide, taking funding with them.
Reid said schools have difficult decisions ahead of them.
"The better the data, the better those decisions will be."
