10/18/2004

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

Where Have All the Children Gone, Again?

Since 1995 Missoula County public schools have seen their K-8 enrollments decline by 1,400 students. One out of every seven school desks that were occupied in 1995 is now empty. It is not surprising that this decline in students has led to the closing of some schools. School closings are painful, especially when it is a neighborhood school that has served as a community center that closes.

That pain and the changes in the character of our neighborhoods as the number of children declines explain much of the emotional controversy that has surrounded the adjustment to a smaller student-age population. A lot of claims have been made about how problems in the local economy have been driving families with children away, leaving us with a distorted age structure. The chief culprits that are usually cited are low pay and high housing costs, which, combined, simply make living in the Missoula area impossible for families with kids.

Although this certainly is a plausible explanation, there is another one: We as a people are getting married later and having fewer children. That, of course, reduces the number of children our schools have to serve. Unless we either have very high rates of in-migration or adopt policies that effectively lead people to change their minds about when to marry and how many kids to have, our school age population is going to be smaller in the future than it was in the past.

The evidence for Missoula County schools suggests that both economic and demographic forces have been at work in reducing the number of kids in our schools. If we look back over the last five years, it appears that demographic forces, not economic forces are what have dominated. If there had be no in- or out-migration since 2000 so that the age structure of the population revealed in the 2000 Census had simply aged in place, our schools would have had fewer students than they actually had. That is, between 2000 and fall of 2004, net migration of families with school-aged children appear to have added children to our schools, not removed them. During that time period, when Missoula was closing schools, it was the demographic character of the existing population, not forced out-migration of young families that explains the decline in enrollments.

If we look back to the 1995-2000 period, however, out-migration of families with children does appear to have played a role. Demographic forces explain only about 40 percent of the decline in the school-aged population. During that time period, Missoula County lost people in the 30-40 year old range to net out-migration. With them certainly went some of the children who otherwise would have been in our schools.

The 2000 Census allows us to track the age of those who came and left the greater Missoula area during the 1995-2000 period since in the Census people were asked the zip code of the place they resided in 1995. To protect confidentiality and reduce statistical error, that data is only available for Missoula, Ravalli, and Mineral Counties combined. That data does not indicate that the greater Missoula area lost children or 30-somethings to out-migration. It shows the opposite, we gained 3,000 school-aged children and almost 900 30-something adults from net in-migration. Maybe the young families and children Missoula itself lost in the 1995-2000 period were not moving very far away!

What does this tell us the decline in school-aged children in the Missoula area? That is not entirely clear. So far in the new decade, there has been net in-migration of school age children that has slowed the greater decline in school enrollment that we otherwise would have faced. We remain, on net, an attractive place for young families. That was true of the greater Missoula area during the 1990s too. The rate of in-migration, however, was not rapid enough to offset the decline in the number of children we are having. Given that we have also been wrestling with the impacts associated with population growth throughout the greater Missoula area, I am not sure anyone would want to advocate a high rate of in-migration simply to boost school enrollments.

At the same time, high land values within the City of Missoula almost certainly tend to push people outward to suburban and exurban developments. That, in fact, is one of the primary explanations for the suburbanization of America to begin with. Montana families obviously share that impulse too; witness the growth in the Bitterroot and Jocko Valleys.

The overall evidence does not support many of the more emotional claims that we are driving young families and their children out of the Missoula area because this has ceased to be a habitable place. For better or worse, we continue to attract new residents, both young and old.