With education options galore for parents and students, each choice by a family makes a statement. It doesn’t take too many choices — a few students gained, a few students lost — to affect which schools are thriving and which are not, how deep a school’s staff is and whether some classes and extracurriculars are offered.
And 20,000 students lost? That’s a sea change.
A good way to get a handle on the decline is to ask: Where did all the kids go?
Here are two answers:
Fewer kids. A smaller but important change is that the universe of kids in Milwaukee is shrinking. Fourteen years ago, the number of children getting publicly funded education was 115,522. That includes conventional schools, as well as partnership schools, charter schools and more. That number rose to between 119,000 and 121,000 in four school years, beginning in September 2012. Then it began declining. It was 114,184 in fall 2020; it was 111,333 in fall 2021; and it was 109,934 in fall 2022, a decline of almost 10% since a peak of 120,895 eight years ago, according to data I’ve been tracking for several years.