Enrollment drops more than expected, Board expresses desire to take action to respond

BVSD’s overall enrollment continued to decline this year, but at a greater rate than expected, BVSD Senior Planner Glen Segrue told the Board in an update earlier this month. The student count dropped 525 students, or 1.9% from last year—1% more than projected. Over the past five years, the downward trend is less steep at 1.3%. This is BVSD’s second biggest drop in enrollment since the pandemic. The district’s enrollment has declined by nearly 3,600 students since 2015.

WATCH: December 9, 2025 Annual Enrollment Update

At most grade levels except 12th, BVSD is seeing the lowest or near lowest enrollment numbers of the last 10 years. Enrollment is expected to continue to decline into the foreseeable future as smaller class sizes progress through the grade levels, Segrue told the Board. 

“This is very sobering data for me,” Board member Lalenia Quinlan Aweida commented. “The problem is here now.”

An influx of migrant students, identified as non-English proficient, in late 2023 and early 2024 that likely helped bolster enrollment last year is largely absent in 2025, and could be a contributing factor to overall numbers coming lower than projected. 

The number of students living in the district dropped in all areas, with Boulder losing more than twice the number of students as the eastern district. Again, this was the largest decline since the pandemic. Losses in eastern BVSD came despite slight gains last year and the construction of family-friendly housing in Lafayette. The loss in resident students was offset in the overall enrollment numbers with the largest contribution of out of district students since 2015.

On a positive note, the number of births in Boulder seems to be leveling after a steep decline until 2019. The rate for the eastern district began to level in 2017. Kindergarten enrollment came in higher than projected, and for the second year in a row, the rate of new kindergarteners showing up was 93% of the number of births five years prior. There was an unexpected loss of students at first grade largely due to students not coming to the district in the numbers anticipated vs. students leaving the district.  

Resources Tied to Enrollment

Student enrollment is a key metric because it determines how much funding the district receives each year from the state. This data is also used to generate enrollment projections for the annual trend report in February and to determine staff and budget allocations for schools.  

In October, Board members discussed the impact that dwindling resources have on the student educational experience and how to proactively respond to the challenges of declining enrollment. While they have not yet determined a path, there was a consensus that the district cannot sustainably remain on its current trajectory. 

With enrollment projected to shrink to unsustainably low levels at a number of schools across the district in the coming years, the Board voiced its concern that, despite heroic efforts by our teachers and staff, the quality of educational programs and availability of services will also dwindle, negatively impacting students.

WATCH: October 21, 2025 Board of Education Work Session

Declining enrollment is beginning to significantly impact schools

Because schools are funded on a per pupil basis, as enrollment shrinks, school budgets and staff allocations also shrink. This can mean the loss of full time art, music, and PE teachers, media specialists, counselors, and paraeducators. 

For classroom teachers, the experience can mean the loss of grade level colleagues to collaborate with and time to plan together. It can also mean reduced ability to differentiate instruction for the varying needs of students or not getting support with challenging student behavior that is disruptive to other students. Sometimes teachers are even asked to teach students in different grade levels in the same classroom when there are not enough students of the same grade for a full class. 

So far, BVSD has been able to help schools fill-in the funding gaps created by shrinking enrollment to mitigate the impact to students. School leaders and teachers work extremely hard at this as well. However, as enrollment numbers drop in more schools, these measures will become unsustainable. 

“A complicating factor is that our staff and community continue to expect the three-round structures [i.e. fully-funded school model] that we are all accustomed to in our schools that have experienced declining enrollment,” Assistant Superintendent of School Leadership Robbyn Fernandez told the Board at the work session.

“It's one thing to have a couple of one round schools, it's another thing to have lots of one round schools,” Superintendent Dr. Rob Anderson explained. “It will increase the amount of dollars that we spend per student to continue the things that we're doing.”

Unfortunately, simultaneously BVSD is facing a tightening budget, so the district will be unable to supplement resources to soften the impact, as it has done in previous years.

“We just can't keep doing the same thing,” Board Member Jason Unger said. “I guess we could, and we would just have a lot of small schools that offer very few services. That's not what I want for my kids, not what I want for our community. I don't want to be a board member who sits here and oversees the decline of student experience for our kids.”

Considering the options

During the work session, district staff provided the Board with six facility reconfiguration options that ranged from the current approach of allowing schools to stay “small,” to the prospect of consolidating or closing schools, along with context on whether they met stated goals:

• Maintain and improve learning outcomes for all students
• Distribute students so all schools have the right level of students/resources to maintain high-quality learning experiences to improve outcomes for all students
• Stabilize overall enrollment by retaining current students and attracting new students to the district
• Ongoing fiscal challenges will require maximizing all efficiencies

“There's really only so many things you can do, right? There's only so many moves or a combination of moves that any district can do when they're going through declining enrollment,” Anderson said. “We need to continue to be proactive enough that we get ahead of problems before we have a crisis on our hands, and that we're thrown into some of the scenarios that we've seen in other districts across the country, across our state, where they're trying to balance the budget by closing schools. That's a really, really difficult place for a school district to be in.”

“Whatever we do here, I do not want to detract from the progress we're making academically at closing disparities in performance,” Anderson added. “In my seven and a half years of working here, I know this community values providing a great experience where all kids belong, and they're challenged academically, and they can be successful.”

“These are difficult conversations. They're sobering conversations to have,” former Board member Beth Niznik said. “I hear a high degree of agreement around this board. Staying small is not an option. That's not on the table. I don't think anyone feels that's the way to go.”

Board member Lalenia Quinlan-Aweida also agreed and added that, for her, fiscal efficiency is a key factor. 

“As a member of our audit committee and as a person who has to provide input and approve the budget, I am not okay with things that do not improve our fiscal efficiency in this budgetary environment, which I expect to get worse,” Quinlan-Aweida said. “That takes out for me ‘Allow schools to stay small’.’”

While consolidation and closure are among the possible tools, Board member Alex Medler said that every option remains on the table.

“I'd be really frustrated if anybody in the media or the community came away with a conclusion that the headline should be ‘BVSD reports plans to accelerate the closure of schools,’ because that is the last thing that we are engaged in here. We are engaged in discussions about all sorts of things you could do to make the student experience better and keep what's good about Boulder Valley.”

Before adjourning, the Board asked for district staff to return with an engagement plan for gathering feedback from the community, before they begin further discussion on next steps. That is tentatively scheduled for January 2026.

Learn more about the district’s efforts to address declining enrollment and view the enrollment data dashboard with district-wide trends on the Declining Enrollment webpage.

More information can also be found on the Long Range Advisory Committee (LRAC) webpage, LRAC is made up of parents, community members and staff who study the district’s enrollment outlook and develop recommendations for long-term facility decisions consistent with the needs of the district and in support of the district’s strategic initiatives.