When Eve Ulloa started working as the parent liaison at Denver’s Castro Elementary School nearly two decades ago, the building was bustling with more than 700 students. Today, the school in heavily Latino southwest Denver has about half that many.
The steep drop is partly due to the loss of Castro’s preschool classes, which were moved to a different school along with a few specialized programs for students with disabilities.
But there are bigger forces at work, too. And they’re the same ones that recently led demographers to predict that Denver Public Schools, once the fastest growing urban school district in the country, will begin to see its numbers shrink. Southwest Denver, home to more elementary school children than any other part of the city, is expected to be the hardest hit.
In Ulloa’s job at Castro bridging home and school, she sees why. In the past, it was common for students to have a sibling in every grade from kindergarten to fifth. Now, she said, the biggest families have at most four children. Parents are dissuaded from having more, she said, because of tight budgets or the fear they’ll be deported and have to leave their kids.
She also has seen an uptick in the number of families forced out of their homes by rising rent, as young adults without children flock to Denver and housing becomes an even hotter commodity. Instead of $700 a month, rentals in the area are going for at least twice that, forcing families to move north to Commerce City or Thornton.
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