The Little Rock School District enrollment -- now at 20,135 students, not counting pre-kindergarten pupils -- is forecast to remain above 20,000 students in the mid-to-best case scenarios for the next five years.
That is among the projections made by Texas-based Zonda Education, a demographics company hired by the district to look at how housing construction, local economic development and charter school counts can be expected to affect the student numbers in the capital city's public school system.
Rocky Gardiner, director of school district consulting for Zonda, provided Little Rock School Board members late last week with a range of projected student counts with 20,500 students in five years being a mid-range count.
On the high end, the district could be expected to exceed 22,000 students within 10 years, he said. At the low end of the range, the district is projected to fall below 20,000, Gardiner said.
Gardiner said the district's biggest challenges are attracting families to the district's kindergarten programs and, once children are enrolled in the elementary grades, retaining them when it is time to transition to the sixth grade in the middle schools.
"When we get them in, we hold on to them until we get to sixth grade. There's a big drop," he said.
The district had 1,831 kindergartners in 2018-19 and 1,534 this school year, according to Gardiner's tables.
Keeping about 95% of students that are leaving for sixth grade could push the district to the 22,000-enrollment mark, he said.
In 2021-22, the district had 1,659 fifth-graders. This year, the district had 1,525 sixth-graders.
The enrollment analysis comes at a time when the district is on the brink of re-drawing at least some school attendance zone boundaries because of population shifts within the district, the recent closing of schools such as Booker and Meadowcliff elementaries, and the construction of new schools.
The district's Dr. Marian G. Lacey Kindergarten-Eighth Grade Academy is well under construction in southwest Little Rock. A traditional high school adjoining Pinnacle View Middle School in the northwest part of the city is in the design stage for construction.
The demographic study also follows on the School Board's setting of overarching district goals last year. One of the goals is to reach a student enrollment of 24,000 or more by 2030.
Little Rock Superintendent Jermall Wright told the board last week that revisiting that goal may be necessary to ensure that target numbers are realistic.
Board member Ali Noland questioned whether there are significant numbers of students who leave the traditional district for middle school grades and then return to the district's high schools.
Gardiner said he would research that, but he noted that it is not unusual for ninth grades at high schools to be large in comparison with eighth-grade numbers. Some of the ninth-graders are not all "returners" to a district but current students who don't have enough credits to be 10th-graders.
"Your 11th and 12th grades are really good," he told the board. "You are holding on to about 98%. That's high."
Board member Evelyn Callaway brought up the potential impact of a taxpayer-funded voucher system that , if passed by state lawmakers this year, would enable families to receive state funding to apply to private school tuition and other education-related costs. The pending draft bill calls for phasing in the system so that by 2025-26 all interested students would be eligible for the vouchers.
"That's going to get us, kill us," Callaway said about the effect on the traditional school system. "My tax dollars will be paying for somebody to go to a private school or to a [public] charter school," said Callaway, who is a retired teacher and mother of adult children. "That doesn't seem fair to me."
Feeding into the Zonda projections for the Little Rock district are total home sales -- which fell by 11% in 2022 compared with 2021 totals, Gardiner said.
But that is paired with the fact that there are about 50 new homes under construction within the district, 150 lots available to build on and more than 800 future lots planned, he said.
Other factors taken into consideration in the study, he said, were on the economic development front -- efforts to expand business at the Port of Little Rock, including an anticipated steel production facility and an equipment distribution center that together could generate more than 550 new jobs to be filled with workers, some of whom will have school-aged children.
Gardiner noted that there are more than two dozen open-enrollment charter schools that are operating throughout Pulaski County independent of the Little Rock district.
But he said he anticipates that the overall enrollment in those schools -- 15,203, including the large Arkansas Virtual and Arkansas Connections academies that serve students statewide -- is likely close to reaching a plateau. That is what has happened to charter school counts in other urban settings, particularly in Texas, he said.
Board member Vicki Hatter questioned that, saying that the number of charter campuses continues to increase.