GRANBY — School Committee Chairman Emre Evren worries that his district is facing what some have described as a slow death spiral.
The vicious cycle began in the 2011-2012 school year, he said, when the district saw a noticeable drop in student enrollment, and along with it, stagnant state education funding amid rising operating costs. Evren pointed to two potential culprits for five consecutive years of declining enrollment: in 2010, town residents voted against financing construction of a new junior/senior high school; and in 2011, the new campus of the private MacDuffie School opened in Granby.
“The more students leave the district, the less funding we get the following year,” Evren said.
That funding reduction can mean a rollback of services, as happened this year when Granby voted against a tax hike override that would have let schools offer the same level of services as the previous year. Instead, the district must now let go of a high school special education teacher, a high school English and language arts teacher and three paraprofessionals.
Those cuts, in turn, can convince more families to look elsewhere for their children’s education, Evren said.
“It keeps on going that way, and that becomes a huge challenge,” Evren said.
To put that challenge into perspective, Granby’s enrollment has shrunk by 31 percent since 2011-2012, according to enrollment data.
The town’s struggles are far from unique. School officials say that rural districts, many of them in the western part of the state, are finding it increasingly difficult to remain economically feasible amid a host of factors: diminishing enrollment, declining or flat revenue coupled with rising operating costs, increased competition from other schools and a loss of the economies of scale that come when a larger group of students share the same resources.
Over the past 15 years, seven of the 10 school districts with the greatest enrollment declines in the state have been located in western Massachusetts, including the Gateway Regional, Mohawk Trail and Shutesbury school districts, according to an October 2016 report by the Massachusetts Rural Schools Coalition.
The resulting picture is grim for many small schools, which in rural communities often play an outsized role as educational institution, gathering place and community hub.
“For people with kids in the school, it’s the center of our community and it’s a tight one,” said Cara Castenson, chairwoman of the Pelham School Committee.
In Granby, the district is bleeding students to nearby traditional public, charter and private schools.
In 2016, 101 students used school choice to leave Granby, including 22 to South Hadley public schools, 15 to Belchertown public schools and 13 to the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School in Hadley. In addition, 51 students enrolled at the MacDuffie School.
In all, 756 students attended Granby schools in the last academic year, down from 1,095 students five years earlier, according to enrollment figures provided by the school district.
The number of students from other communities using school choice to attend Granby Public Schools, meanwhile, has remained relatively flat over the past several years.
There’s another development that could worsen the situation, noted Granby Superintendent Sheryl Stanton.
“Now we’ve started seeing some of our elementary school families starting to choose Belchertown or South Hadley,” she said, of primary school students.
Often, she said, families choose those schools because they perceive they will find smaller classes and better educational opportunities in those districts. But Stanton said that’s not the case.
“It’s sort of an unfortunate situation because Granby does provide a high-quality education for kids,” she said.
Stanton said she hopes that the completion in 2018 of a new K-6 elementary school will help draw more school choice students to Granby from surrounding districts.
To offset losses in enrollment, some rural districts rely on an influx of out-of-district students who use school choice and bring public tuition dollars with them. About a quarter of students in Hatfield, for example, attend the district’s schools by “choicing in” from cities like Holyoke, according to Hatfield Superintendent John Robert.
“We are somewhat dependent on school choice in order to be a viable district,” Robert said, adding that the influx of students has benefited the district in ways that extend beyond finances. “In Hatfield it has given us great diversity, which has helped us a lot.”
Robert knows, however, there are many good school districts that end up losing out because students choice-out. “There are definitely negative side effects, there’s no doubt about that,” he said.
Rural schools are often small, with only one teacher per grade. That means finding places to cut can be difficult.
In the Hilltowns, Gateway Regional School District closed three small elementary schools in 2010, consolidating five elementary schools into two, in large part because of declining enrollment. The consolidation initially saved some $500,000, but with rising costs and plummeting enrollment the district now finds itself in the same financial straits.
Gateway Superintendent David Hopson said the number of students leaving and arriving through school choice has stayed consistent over the years, though they have accounted for a larger percentage of the overall student body. More than school choice, Hopson said, his district’s enrollment numbers are largely affected by the changing demographic realities that so many rural towns see.
“We have a lot of relatively older people who no longer have children in the schools, and a lot of the young folks that graduate from the area move out to seek jobs,” he said.
Hopson said the lack of economic opportunity in rural towns has kept families with children from moving into the district. In addition, he and others say, the lack of broadband internet has been a deficiency that makes these small communities less appealing to a new generation of families and businesses.
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.