Fewer Kids, Hard Choices for Long Island Schools

By John Hildebrand, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.

Sep. 2–After 80 years in Patchogue Village, the maple-shaded River Elementary School would appear as fixed a landmark as the boatyards a few blocks away.

So parents were startled a few months ago when a school board trustee raised the idea — quickly shelved — of closing River School to save money. River Elementary is the smallest school in the Patchogue-Medford system, and has lost more than 20 percent of its enrollment in grades K-5 over the past six years.

“It came out of the absolute blue — completely shocking!” said Laurie Dallas, a longtime PTA volunteer whose youngest child, Patrick, 4, will enter the school’s new pre-kindergarten program Thursday. “River Elementary is not just a school — it’s a little family.”

Patchogue residents are not the only ones caught off guard by changing enrollment patterns. Across Long Island, a drop in student numbers, following more than a decade of robust growth, has confounded experts’ predictions. An underlying cause of decline is falling birthrates, but changes in home-buying habits also may play a part.

Regional demographers, who once predicted student rolls would climb to 485,900 this fall, have since cut their projection by nearly 20,000. Island-wide enrollments have dropped two years straight — fractionally in 2005, then more substantially last fall — providing clear evidence of a downward trend. Authorities expect the decline to continue over the next five to eight years, though they say it should be gradual.

As classes reopen this week, school administrators from Rocky Point to Lynbrook are keeping a close eye on incoming kindergarten classes, hoping the numbers don’t fall too sharply, and planning uses for any vacant space. Many districts are concerned that further erosion could jeopardize teachers’ jobs, and some districts face taxpayer complaints that they have exaggerated their prospects for growth to justify large tax increases.

On the brighter side, falling enrollments can help curb school costs. Also, regional policy planners suggest that this would be an ideal time for districts to consider creative solutions to decline — for example, by merging with neighboring systems or by sharing services in ways rejected in the past.

“Instead of putting up new buildings, school districts should be looking at sharing buildings,” said Martin R. Cantor, director of the Long Island Economic and Social Policy Institute at Dowling College. “Certain communities are snobby — they don’t want to share their school facilities. We’ve got to stop being selfish, or we’re going to wind up an aging, decrepit old suburb.”

Enrollment outlooks vary from one locale to another. Some districts in eastern Suffolk County continue to enjoy growth, while others throughout the Island are taking a hit.

Last spring, the state-run Roosevelt district, which has faced a series of financial crises, forecast a 14 percent drop in enrollment this fall, though those figures have yet to be verified.

Lawrence schools also face major challenges. The system has shrunk by nearly 10 percent, or 370 students, over the past seven years, because an influx of Orthodox Jewish families has resulted in more children being sent to private schools.

Lawrence has already closed one elementary school. And last month, schools Superintendent John T. Fitzsimons proposed a study to determine whether two more of the remaining four elementary schools should shut down over the next three years.

Some of Lawrence’s public-school parents think this would undermine their entire system. But Fitzsimons says the district must realistically determine how many school buildings it will need in the future. Until then, he adds, a district board now dominated by private-school parents will be reluctant to invest new money in building renovations.

“That’s what they want to know: ‘Why would we want to put money in a building that might be closed in a few years?’” Fitzsimons said.

At the headquarters of Western Suffolk BOCES in Huntington Station, demographers who project enrollments each year acknowledge they overestimated growth potential three years ago. Paula Klingelhoefer, a divisional director for the agency, says the problem stemmed in part from a shift in the nature of homebuyers, with an apparent recent increase in families with older children or no children at all.

“But the decline will not be sharp, it will be subtle,” she added. “It will stabilize again.

As for surplus classrooms, Klingelhoefer and other educational planners note that districts already are finding new uses for such space. Many districts such as Patchogue-Medford and Rocky Point have added pre-kindergarten classes, or divided classrooms into smaller cubicles for individual tutoring.

West Babylon came up with another approach a few years ago, when it concluded that enrollments wouldn’t continue to grow as originally thought. The district decided then not to build additional elementary classrooms, but to put its already approved construction money into a new fitness center. This proved a hit with adults from the community who pay $15 per semester to exercise in the center at night.

Elsewhere, however, some taxpayer advocates fear their schools will get stuck with surplus space. Fred Gorman of Nesconset, a founder of an Island-wide watchdog group known as Long Islanders for Educational Reform, says it’s understandable districts would err slightly on the high side when estimating future enrollments and space needs. He adds, however, that some districts have obviously inflated their figures.

Case in point: When Island districts projected last year’s enrollments, 34 predicted declines. In reality, 59 districts experienced declines when the final figures came in, and some declines were more than double the rate predicted.

“A school district is a bureaucracy, which means it wants to grow,” Gorman said. “To that end, districts will use their power to overestimate, and sometimes they get carried away.”

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