District 65 demographic study shows an aging population, fewer school-age kids

A new demographic study commissioned by Evanston/Skokie School District 65 projects the district’s enrollment to fall by another 7.3% from now through 2029 before stabilizing around 5,400 students in the 2030s.

Total enrollment stood at 5,922 students as of fall 2024, down more than 20% from a pre-pandemic enrollment of 7,419 in the 2019-2020 school year, according to a presentation that Stacy Beardsley, the assistant superintendent of performance, management and accountability, gave to the school board on Monday night.

“Evanston-Skokie School District 65 will experience steady population and modest enrollment decline over the next 10 years, primarily due to a growing elderly population, an increase in empty nest housing stock and relatively low number of housing units turning over,” a firm called McKibben Demographic Research wrote in the executive summary of its 42-page report.

According to McKibben, the median age of all people living in the district’s attendance boundaries is projected to increase from 37.2 in 2020 to 41 in 2035. At the same time, the fertility rate, measured in births per woman, is expected to average out at 1.33 over that same time period, which is significantly below the replacement level of 2.1.

Most importantly, the firm also compared actual enrollments since 2020 to the total number of students eligible to enroll as a way of measuring the percentage of local kids who attend public schools. The results are in the table below.

The “Evanston-Skokie District 65 Total” row represents the number of kids who were that age in 2020 based on U.S. Census data from that year. The columns allow you to follow what percentage of a given cohort has attended District 65 schools in a given year since 2020. For example, you can see that the current second grade group has increased by about 70 kids since they were in kindergarten, suggesting that the district is gaining back some kids who started kindergarten in private schools or being homeschooled.

This year’s eighth grade saw the biggest enrollment declines around the pandemic years. In 2020, 77.6% of that age group was in District 65 schools, compared with 68.8% today.

Despite some positive trends in that table, McKibben is still forecasting continued enrollment declines because of that top row, which shows the number of school-age kids per year falling by about 300, from more than 1,000 children who were 13 in 2020 to just over 700 who were less than a year old in 2020.

“The story on this table is there’s certainly more students out there potentially to enroll, but the district is recovering a pretty significant percentage of the students that we did lose in the pandemic, and we’re getting back closer to that number [percentage] that we had right as we entered the pandemic,” Beardsley said.

But at the same time, “students available to enroll has fallen off by 350, which is a very significant shift over a period of 10 years,” she said.

McKibben also analyzed both enrollment and general population projections for each school’s attendance boundaries, which are in the slides below. These numbers are based on the future attendance boundaries that will go into place for the 2026-2027 school year once the new Foster School opens in the Fifth Ward. In particular, this part of the study is going to inform some of the administration’s future recommendations around school closures, Beardsley said.

Given changes to the boundaries, Lincolnwood, Kingsley and Willard are the elementary schools projected to have the smallest enrollments by 2029. Foster School is expected to be the biggest elementary school at that time, with an estimated 430 students.

Interestingly, the general population citywide is still forecast to be stable despite the decline in K-8 children. Notably, McKibben projected the population within Foster School’s attendance boundaries to rise by 8.8% from 2020 to 2030.

“What this is indicating is that population in the Evanston/Skokie District 65 school district actually goes up by a half percentage point,” Beardsley explained, “but because it’s an aging population, because the median age is getting older in the school district, because we have … lower replacement rates around fertility, there are fewer school-age children to enroll.”