GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — The Green Bay Area Public School District projects its enrollment will decline nearly 15% over the next 10 years.
It’s a problem many school districts across the country are facing as birth rates have declined six consecutive years.
In 10 years, all 34 of the traditional schools in the Green Bay Area Public School District are projected to be below their target capacities, including Preble High School. It hasn’t been able to say that since the ’00-’01 school year.
“Well I think we need to look at the number of facilities that we have at each grade and level, elementary, middle, and high school,” said Stephen Murley, the district’s superintendent. “We have to think about programming needs for kids and then long-term we have to think about how we develop a facilities’ plan that actually meets students’ educational needs.”
Murley says the district hopes to have a new facilities master plan done by the end of the ‘22-‘23 school year.
The last one was completed before the April 2017 referendum when voters approved spending $68.5 million. The money was largely to address capacity issues at east side elementary and middle schools.
District data shows eight years ago, 14 of the districts’ 34 traditional schools were above their target capacity. Currently, Preble High school is the only one, with 126 more students than the ideal amount. In 10 years, Preble is projected to be about that many students below its capacity.
The enrollment drop, however, doesn’t necessarily mean there won’t be new schools coming to the district.
“We’ve had a lot of input that has come to us from the west side of town that has looked at the Red Smith model and inquired about whether a K-8 model might be a good fit for them,” said Murley. “Obviously if it is, that would potentially impact both the elementary and the middle school facilities that we have on the west side of town. So you might see addition and subtraction as we go through this process.”
The issue on the west side has been empty classrooms.
District numbers show 12 west side schools currently have room for 100 or more students. Overall, for the district,17 of the 34 traditional schools have room for that many students. In 10 years, that number is projected to increase to 24.
To look at making enrollment more balanced through the district, a boundaries task force was formed in the fall of 2017.
“We need to strengthen and build programs to pull students to schools where capacity actually exists,” said Luke Davis, co-chair of the task force, while presenting recommendations to the board in 2018.
Superintendent Murley joined the district more than two years after the task force presented its recommendations to the school board.
FOX 11 asked Murley if he knows if the district implemented any of the task force’s recommendations.
“I don’t think there were any significant changes that occurred as a result of that, but I think that again gives us great perspective on what people were thinking about at the time,” said Murley. “Put that in the context of what the new numbers tell us that and again through extensive community conversation that we’ll go through over the course of the next 18 months, really helps get a direction for the future of the district.”
FOX 11 messaged a few people who served on that boundaries task force. One told us he believes the district provided the group with data that would lead to the result the district wanted. Upon hearing this issue was coming up again, another person said it’s kind of like a revolving door of spending precious resources to talk about issues and never really doing anything.
The district hopes to get the conversation going on its new facilities master plan this spring.
“And then really make sure as we close in on the end of the 22-23 school year, that plan has come into shape, so we can make sure we’ve got input from all of our partners and entities that are part of that process so that in the end when the board formulates a final plan that it has really gone through multiple measures, lots of analysis, lots of feedback and has that community support that we know we’ll need in order to pass a referendum in order to support it,” said Murley.
The district also has three specialty schools, an alternative school, and two charter schools.
Aldo Leopold and Leonardo Da Vinci School for gifted learners are expected to be above capacity in 10 years. Right now, Aldo Leopold is about 60 students above its ideal capacity and that isn’t expected to change much over the next decade. Da Vinci is about 10 students over right now, and that isn’t expected to change much either.
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