Thanks for digging into the data. Please submit this to the public comment feedback at BSD. bsd@bsd405.org. If note that it's a public comment, the board is required to review it and it is recorded.
I agree with all of your points. This is a great comprehensive study and I had the same issues with the demographics data. The demographer is someone from Colorado. He is likely missing "on the ground" feel for the data. Why do we have to get a demographer from Colorado to do this work? It's like asking some guy from China to figure out American politics using infromation gleaned from newspapers.
For correlation between house prices and enrollment, you only looked at the period around covid. I am not surprised that density mattered more than house prices. If you looked at enrollment change over time as a time series vs house prices as a time series, I think you will find that enrollment goes up with house prices. From what I know living here, every parent, of almost every culture backgound/origin buys houses in Bellevue for the schools. It is not economical to live in Bellevue and pay a premium if you don't have kids and can't benefit. I am talking about people who move here not the people who are already here for other reasons previously. If schools dont' matter, places like Burien (Three Three Point) for example become much more attractive. When the demand exceeds the supply, prices go up. So when there is lots of demand for people to move here for the schools, prices and enrollment goes up. The opposite will happen. House prices are a result of enrollment demand, not the driver of it.
Just copied and pasted the post to the board in an email.
I had similar thoughts on the relationship between schools and housing prices, but didn't know how to quantify it. My intuition is that housing prices and school district quality are self reinforcing as you say. School quality was a big reason why my wife and I wanted to stay in Bellevue when we were looking for a bigger house for our future children. We could have saved a lot of money if that wasn't a factor.
I can't comment with a graph but if you click the link you can see a graph I made. I only used data from 2015. The relationship is pretty strong. Higher house prices actually mean higher enrollment. The drivers of house prices is the quality of the schools and the city overall and employment/economy/immigration etc.
In a discussion last week, our school principal offered some more detail about the cost of housing and potential impacts - apparently there were ~2100 records transfer requests last year. ~150 were from private schools, but the rest were mostly from schools in comparatively lower cost areas - Snohomish, Eastern Washington, Idaho, and beyond.
I think that could help offer some support to the cost of living rationale, not sure the best way to validate the transfer details independently. If one looks at today's price of homes for sale in the "affordable" neighborhoods of Bellevue it's ~1 - 1.5 million for 1960s construction and ~$3 million+ for new construction.
Thanks for your comment. This is something I looked at but didn't end up including in the post: there's debate among demographers about how housing prices impact birth rates.
Some studies find that there's an inverse relationship, higher housing prices means fewer kids.
I don't think it's clear that higher housing prices have had an impact on enrollment, and as far as I can tell they're not an input in the district's forecast.
lots of babies are born in west bell/bell- and most move by Kinder- so many babies at downtown park- mom and dad do the city apt life with one baby but by 5 and second baby- they are living somewhere cheaper with more space and not in a city center - school closures will continue in this area.
I would be somewhat skeptical of private school transfer request numbers. We never requested BSD to send any information to the private school we switched to. Particularly at an elementary level, I'd venture it really isn't needed.
I think the growth in the operations category (Code 42, 44, 52, 53 etc) is expected because that column is the "actual" spend. It would be nice if there was a "budget" column corresponding to that year to confirm, but it makes sense that because schools were not operating normally in 2020-21 that "consumable" costs like food/transportation would drop substantially and then grow back to more normal levels once they reopen.
Thanks for the digging into this data. Would be nice to know why teaching support budget grows 14mil/3% when enrollment is dropping
My daughter goes to private school in Bellevue and we have certainly seen increased enrollment post COVID; several new kids that used to be in public schools within BSD. Would this show in the districts data and is it significant? Trend had been quite obvious at our school.
It is extremely frustrating to hear that the district is planning on closings down or converting some of the elementary schools. There are actually 18 elementary schools in the district-- the last of which was added in the 2018-19 school year. At that time, while the pandemic was quite unexpected, I think the district had solid evidence of declining birth rates and increasing housing prices.
Based on the information that the district has presented, I support their decision, even if I don't like it. If the district closes 3 elementary schools by consolidating from 18 to 15 elementary schools. Then, moves Big Picture and International School (both have enrollments smaller than many of the Elemenary Schools and were on the rebuild list) into former elementary school buildings there is just one mothballed school.
Maybe I am drinking the district's Kool-Aid, but I did take the school district at their word when they said the total numbers for grade cohorts in Middle and High School are now about 1,600 students and that those in K-2 are 1,400 students. They also said that overall the district schools are operating at 68% capacity overall (off my memory), and some are operating at 50% capacity. It would be useful information to know what the capacity of the different schools are, when considering what schools are to be consolidated. I wrote to the district after Melissa DeVita's presentation and have yet to hear back.
The declines in enrollment at Sherwood Forest and Ardmore (two of the schools that are on the district's list) were said to come in part from the service sector workers who left the district when their jobs disappeared during the pandemic. While many of the white-collar/tech employers did not shed jobs during the pandemic, you still see the effect of the lost of service workers -- shorter hours at pharmacies and restaurants, longer lines at the grocery stores, etc. The average apartment price in Bellevue (per BSD presentations) is approximately $2,500. At full-time at minimum wage, $17.74/hour, one makes about $2,775/month, which makes living in Bellevue difficult for lower-income workers.
Again, I am sorry to all the impacted families. It is stressful and difficult to have to change schools. Despite rumblings, it did feel like the district "sprung" this on the parents.
I don't know if this helps, I would like to point out that many students, even at their local schools, have to take the bus to get to/from school. The district provides transportation for students who are more than a 1-mile radius from their school. My children went to the old Puesta del Sol and I was always impressed with the transportation services and the drivers. I even was happy to pay for the service when the cost was no covered by the district.
As a parent of a BSD graduate and a high school student, I have always been impressed with the quality of instruction, the passion of the teachers, and the efforts of the school district to work hard to improve out-comes for each student.
Thanks for the correction on the number of elementary schools. In my hurry I'd just counted the schools at the top of this page: https://bsd405.org/schools/elementary/. I'll edit the article.
I think all of these things are true: overall enrollment has declined, population of school-age children has increased, and the public school enrollment trend is accelerating in the right direction.
Every school district with more than 10,000 students, except for Seattle, is trending in the right direction. Between the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years over half of those districts added students, and the remainder lost fewer students than they did between the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years.
I think it would be prudent to wait and see if the next couple of years end up with Bellevue School District joining the list of districts that are growing.
You refer to a $2.9M budget deficit, but this is not what is driving the decision. It’s the loss of $20M state “hold harmless” funding, which kept state school funding at pre-covid levels. This ends next year.
Also, from my reading of the BSD budget docs, we ran a $7M loss last year, and will run the same this year. What ever rainy day fund we have, is already being drawn from. Next year, it jumps to a budget deficit of $10M, then $14M, then $19M. See slide 15:
“Beginning” fund was $37M at the start of this academic year. By end of 24/25 it will be pretty much exhausted. Does it sound worth blowing all that money just to delay the inevitable closing of 3 schools? That doesn’t seem like good fiscal stewardship, to me.
I guess the question comes down to: Do we stop the bleeding now, or continue to draw down from the ‘rainy day’ fund? Personally, I’m of the mind set of fix the problem now; don’t simply kick the can down the road.
Frankly, (If I may be permitted one more cliche) this BSD ship is sinking; and talk of trimming admin budgets etc is simply rearranging deck chairs.
Here’s the reference for the $20M drop: skip to 3:30, if you don’t want to watch the whole thing (Though I recommend everyone does).
Thanks for all of this research. As a graduate of BSD and the parent of a BSD graduate, here’s my 2 cents:
Voters have trusted the school district with almost $2 Billion since 2002 to demolish and rebuild every school in the district because we want and expect the quality of education to be the highest possible. I would guess that most of us moved to Bellevue because of the reputation of BSD and the appeal of sending our kids to a school in our own neighborhood with their friends.
The debate over the validity of the reasons for the declining enrollment really isn’t as important as the absurdity of the budget numbers. I would argue that administrative costs and personnel were already in excess long before the decline in enrollment started. Seems to me it would be easy to find enough cuts in non-essential administrative waste to balance the budget and keep all of the schools open.
Do the budget forecast not take into account the loss of the hold harmless dollars from the State? If that loss is factored in to 2023-24, then Brandon would be right to use the aggregate numbers. What's your take on the 1.2M spending increases?
Since publishing this we’ve been told by the district that the budget gap is $20 million split over the next three years. I only had budgets up to the 2022-23 school year to look at, so the gap I saw there would not include loss of hold harmless.
Thanks for digging into the data. Please submit this to the public comment feedback at BSD. bsd@bsd405.org. If note that it's a public comment, the board is required to review it and it is recorded.
I agree with all of your points. This is a great comprehensive study and I had the same issues with the demographics data. The demographer is someone from Colorado. He is likely missing "on the ground" feel for the data. Why do we have to get a demographer from Colorado to do this work? It's like asking some guy from China to figure out American politics using infromation gleaned from newspapers.
For correlation between house prices and enrollment, you only looked at the period around covid. I am not surprised that density mattered more than house prices. If you looked at enrollment change over time as a time series vs house prices as a time series, I think you will find that enrollment goes up with house prices. From what I know living here, every parent, of almost every culture backgound/origin buys houses in Bellevue for the schools. It is not economical to live in Bellevue and pay a premium if you don't have kids and can't benefit. I am talking about people who move here not the people who are already here for other reasons previously. If schools dont' matter, places like Burien (Three Three Point) for example become much more attractive. When the demand exceeds the supply, prices go up. So when there is lots of demand for people to move here for the schools, prices and enrollment goes up. The opposite will happen. House prices are a result of enrollment demand, not the driver of it.
Just copied and pasted the post to the board in an email.
I had similar thoughts on the relationship between schools and housing prices, but didn't know how to quantify it. My intuition is that housing prices and school district quality are self reinforcing as you say. School quality was a big reason why my wife and I wanted to stay in Bellevue when we were looking for a bigger house for our future children. We could have saved a lot of money if that wasn't a factor.
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s82/sh/16098d45-d408-6bc0-471a-f4410327e4dc/6b1df43a3b04b08462826e4dd72cc489
I can't comment with a graph but if you click the link you can see a graph I made. I only used data from 2015. The relationship is pretty strong. Higher house prices actually mean higher enrollment. The drivers of house prices is the quality of the schools and the city overall and employment/economy/immigration etc.
Thanks for the detailed writeup!
In a discussion last week, our school principal offered some more detail about the cost of housing and potential impacts - apparently there were ~2100 records transfer requests last year. ~150 were from private schools, but the rest were mostly from schools in comparatively lower cost areas - Snohomish, Eastern Washington, Idaho, and beyond.
I think that could help offer some support to the cost of living rationale, not sure the best way to validate the transfer details independently. If one looks at today's price of homes for sale in the "affordable" neighborhoods of Bellevue it's ~1 - 1.5 million for 1960s construction and ~$3 million+ for new construction.
Thanks for your comment. This is something I looked at but didn't end up including in the post: there's debate among demographers about how housing prices impact birth rates.
Some studies find that there's an inverse relationship, higher housing prices means fewer kids.
Some studies find that rising home prices impact the kind of person who chooses to live there, and that kind of person will tend to have an average amount of children, but just later in life: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-14/the-complex-relationship-between-house-prices-and-fertility
Some find that higher rents have a negative impact on births, while higher home prices have a positive effect: https://ifstudies.org/blog/higher-rent-fewer-babies-housing-costs-and-fertility-decline
And some find that when housing prices rise, the decline in births among renters is offset by the rise in births among homeowners: https://www.nber.org/digest/feb12/impact-real-estate-market-fertility
I don't think it's clear that higher housing prices have had an impact on enrollment, and as far as I can tell they're not an input in the district's forecast.
lots of babies are born in west bell/bell- and most move by Kinder- so many babies at downtown park- mom and dad do the city apt life with one baby but by 5 and second baby- they are living somewhere cheaper with more space and not in a city center - school closures will continue in this area.
Appreciate the extra context! Thank you!
I would be somewhat skeptical of private school transfer request numbers. We never requested BSD to send any information to the private school we switched to. Particularly at an elementary level, I'd venture it really isn't needed.
Cost of living is one theory and component but another idea is that people were moving to schools in areas that had less restrictive covid policies.
I think the growth in the operations category (Code 42, 44, 52, 53 etc) is expected because that column is the "actual" spend. It would be nice if there was a "budget" column corresponding to that year to confirm, but it makes sense that because schools were not operating normally in 2020-21 that "consumable" costs like food/transportation would drop substantially and then grow back to more normal levels once they reopen.
Thanks for the digging into this data. Would be nice to know why teaching support budget grows 14mil/3% when enrollment is dropping
Just FYI, homeschool data only includes kids age 8 & up. So those numbers don’t include K-2.
My daughter goes to private school in Bellevue and we have certainly seen increased enrollment post COVID; several new kids that used to be in public schools within BSD. Would this show in the districts data and is it significant? Trend had been quite obvious at our school.
It is extremely frustrating to hear that the district is planning on closings down or converting some of the elementary schools. There are actually 18 elementary schools in the district-- the last of which was added in the 2018-19 school year. At that time, while the pandemic was quite unexpected, I think the district had solid evidence of declining birth rates and increasing housing prices.
Based on the information that the district has presented, I support their decision, even if I don't like it. If the district closes 3 elementary schools by consolidating from 18 to 15 elementary schools. Then, moves Big Picture and International School (both have enrollments smaller than many of the Elemenary Schools and were on the rebuild list) into former elementary school buildings there is just one mothballed school.
Maybe I am drinking the district's Kool-Aid, but I did take the school district at their word when they said the total numbers for grade cohorts in Middle and High School are now about 1,600 students and that those in K-2 are 1,400 students. They also said that overall the district schools are operating at 68% capacity overall (off my memory), and some are operating at 50% capacity. It would be useful information to know what the capacity of the different schools are, when considering what schools are to be consolidated. I wrote to the district after Melissa DeVita's presentation and have yet to hear back.
The declines in enrollment at Sherwood Forest and Ardmore (two of the schools that are on the district's list) were said to come in part from the service sector workers who left the district when their jobs disappeared during the pandemic. While many of the white-collar/tech employers did not shed jobs during the pandemic, you still see the effect of the lost of service workers -- shorter hours at pharmacies and restaurants, longer lines at the grocery stores, etc. The average apartment price in Bellevue (per BSD presentations) is approximately $2,500. At full-time at minimum wage, $17.74/hour, one makes about $2,775/month, which makes living in Bellevue difficult for lower-income workers.
Again, I am sorry to all the impacted families. It is stressful and difficult to have to change schools. Despite rumblings, it did feel like the district "sprung" this on the parents.
I don't know if this helps, I would like to point out that many students, even at their local schools, have to take the bus to get to/from school. The district provides transportation for students who are more than a 1-mile radius from their school. My children went to the old Puesta del Sol and I was always impressed with the transportation services and the drivers. I even was happy to pay for the service when the cost was no covered by the district.
As a parent of a BSD graduate and a high school student, I have always been impressed with the quality of instruction, the passion of the teachers, and the efforts of the school district to work hard to improve out-comes for each student.
Thanks for the correction on the number of elementary schools. In my hurry I'd just counted the schools at the top of this page: https://bsd405.org/schools/elementary/. I'll edit the article.
I think all of these things are true: overall enrollment has declined, population of school-age children has increased, and the public school enrollment trend is accelerating in the right direction.
Every school district with more than 10,000 students, except for Seattle, is trending in the right direction. Between the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years over half of those districts added students, and the remainder lost fewer students than they did between the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years.
I think it would be prudent to wait and see if the next couple of years end up with Bellevue School District joining the list of districts that are growing.
May I have your permission to print and distribute your write up at the school board meetings?
Yes, feel free to print as-is or edit to your liking.
You refer to a $2.9M budget deficit, but this is not what is driving the decision. It’s the loss of $20M state “hold harmless” funding, which kept state school funding at pre-covid levels. This ends next year.
Also, from my reading of the BSD budget docs, we ran a $7M loss last year, and will run the same this year. What ever rainy day fund we have, is already being drawn from. Next year, it jumps to a budget deficit of $10M, then $14M, then $19M. See slide 15:
https://bsd405.org/wp-content/pdf/budget/2022-23-budget-overview-presentation.pdf
“Beginning” fund was $37M at the start of this academic year. By end of 24/25 it will be pretty much exhausted. Does it sound worth blowing all that money just to delay the inevitable closing of 3 schools? That doesn’t seem like good fiscal stewardship, to me.
I guess the question comes down to: Do we stop the bleeding now, or continue to draw down from the ‘rainy day’ fund? Personally, I’m of the mind set of fix the problem now; don’t simply kick the can down the road.
Frankly, (If I may be permitted one more cliche) this BSD ship is sinking; and talk of trimming admin budgets etc is simply rearranging deck chairs.
Here’s the reference for the $20M drop: skip to 3:30, if you don’t want to watch the whole thing (Though I recommend everyone does).
https://youtu.be/vwyDIAZpOHQ
Further, it costs an average $21,675 per child per year, at the list of schools that are potentially on the chopping block.
In contrast, it costs an average of just $15,388 at our 3 biggest elem schools (Cherry Crest, Spiritridge & Somerset).
So, we’re currently paying 40% more per child to keep these schools running at such low enrollments.
Thanks for all of this research. As a graduate of BSD and the parent of a BSD graduate, here’s my 2 cents:
Voters have trusted the school district with almost $2 Billion since 2002 to demolish and rebuild every school in the district because we want and expect the quality of education to be the highest possible. I would guess that most of us moved to Bellevue because of the reputation of BSD and the appeal of sending our kids to a school in our own neighborhood with their friends.
The debate over the validity of the reasons for the declining enrollment really isn’t as important as the absurdity of the budget numbers. I would argue that administrative costs and personnel were already in excess long before the decline in enrollment started. Seems to me it would be easy to find enough cuts in non-essential administrative waste to balance the budget and keep all of the schools open.
Do the budget forecast not take into account the loss of the hold harmless dollars from the State? If that loss is factored in to 2023-24, then Brandon would be right to use the aggregate numbers. What's your take on the 1.2M spending increases?
Since publishing this we’ve been told by the district that the budget gap is $20 million split over the next three years. I only had budgets up to the 2022-23 school year to look at, so the gap I saw there would not include loss of hold harmless.
1.2M spending on PR?
I think you can contact the archdiocese to at least see their growth for catholic schools. They have grown quite a bit.