Aurora Public Schools is seeing the largest decline of students in decades, and it is likely that the enrollment numbers will not improve for five more years, school officials said on Tuesday.
Even as the student population drops, the decline is not uniform across the city, and the recovery may not be either, officials said. The largest loss of students is in the northwest corner of the city, an area of high poverty, while most growth is likely to be in the eastern portion of the district, near Bennett, officials said.
Those trends, derived from the districtap daily tracking of enrollment and presented to the school board on Tuesday, will present a set of different challenges in each part of the district and the districtap long-term strategic plan for addressing them expired this year.
“A question the entire community is going to have to answer is how can we rest assured that we’re going to be able to provide educational opportunities to all kids, understanding that we have some pretty dramatic differences,” said Anthony Sturges, chief operating officer for the district.
Enrollment for the district, according to numbers from the end of September, is about 41,250. That is down from a peak of 42,569 in 2015.
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