Tempe Union seeing fewer students from outside the district

Students living outside of Tempe Union High School District boundaries have been a significant driver for overall enrollment, but that’s starting to change.

Demographer Rick Brammer of Applied Economics LLC last week gave the Tempe Union Governing Board a detailed look at student enrollment patterns.

Much of his presentation looked at how the district’s current enrollment of about 13,493 is likely to be impacted by a relentlessly falling birth rate and the continuing increasing difficulty of finding affordable housing in the district for families with children. 

“School age population and in-district enrollment are likely to decrease steadily over the next 10 years, declining by about 770 students during the period,” his study concluded. “Many multifamily projects in the district are not targeted to, or affordable for, families with children.”

That means that the district likely will not see enrollment grow.

“The single-family development is limited,” Brammer said. “Lots of the multifamily (development) that we get just generally doesn’t produce kids and because of that, I’m not looking for enrollment to crater in any sort of way but I just don’t see there’s any way you could possibly really increase either.”

Over the years, Brammer noted, out-of-district students have helped prop up Tempe Union’s total enrollment while an increasing number of families living within the district are sending their children either to a charter or private school or, to a lesser degree, other districts.

Right now, he said, there are about 4,200 students

within Tempe Union’s boundaries who are of high school

age and who aren’t attending the district’s schools. 

“There’s always the possibility that you could get some of those back too and so it’s not solely driven by the demographics,” Brammer said. 

“We still have got to keep your eye on marketing and still keep reaching out and try to bring in the kids that are actually already out there.”

Within the district, he added, there are 13 charter schools with a total enrollment of about 3,600 students and seven private schools serving a total 1,300 kids. Not all of those students live within Tempe Union boundaries.

In looking at where out-of-district students come from, Brammer reported that the most, 1,308 live within Phoenix Union boundaries. Mesa Unified and Maricopa account for 463 and 433, respectively, and Chandler Unified another 268. 

Other districts represented considerably lower numbers of students attending Tempe Union schools.

“We didn’t really get the impact of the freeway yet,” Brammer told the board, referring to the now nearly 18-month-old South Mountain Freeway.

“We got 31 students from the Tolleson Union High School District this year versus only 18, 16, 19 in prior years, so I do believe that is going to have an impact. Again, it’s something we’re going to have to monitor. We would be knowing more this year were it not for COVID.”

But overall, attendance by students living in outside districts is falling – which Brammer attributed largely to improvements being made in those students’ home districts.

“They are doing a little better job and trying to make a bigger effort of trying to hang on to their own students,” he said.

Brammer’s study also showed that there is a lot of movement within the district and that many students living within a high school’s attendance area choose a different Tempe Union campus.

“Significant differences exist between the number of students in each attendance area and the number at each school,” his study found. “Out-of-district is still the largest attendance area by student count, but that may change.”

The study showed that 70.8 percent of all Tempe Union students are enrolled in the high school for their attendance area – meaning that nearly a third go to another district high school farther from their homes.

The study showed that 85.2 percent of Desert Vista High School’s enrollment comprises students who lived within its attendance boundaries while only 51.2 percent of Mountain Pointe’s enrollment comprises students within its attendance area. Corona del Sol and McClintock high schools had percentages of students in its attendance areas that were close to that of Desert Vista.