The Newton school district has been subject to collapsing enrollment numbers, specifically in the 2024-25 school year. This isn’t localized to Newton schools, however, as other districts in the Wichita metro area have seen similar trends. Officials have been trying to pin a reason to the numbers but are divided on what is at fault. A frequently discussed topic is nationwide births being at an all-time low Newton schools identified falling birth rates as a top reason for lower enrollment.
“These are the number of live births in Harvey County, from 2005 all the way up to 2022 and when you look at like 2019 for example, 2019 there are 389 kids, okay? 2023, 54, that’s a huge drop,” Newton Superintendent Fred VanRanken said. “So when you start thinking about that, so this would have been like the class of 2020, the kindergarten class of 2020, coming in 2016 we got about 51% of those kids.”
Falling birth rates aren’t localized to just Newton. Schools in the Wichita metro area are also citing live births as one of the reasons behind the trend.
“There’s actually a decline in birth rates worldwide, we did a demographic study three years ago. They actually showed our losing some students over the next 10 years for the contributing factors of the decline in birth rates,” Haysville Superintendent Jeff Hersh said.
One of the consequences of falling births is logistical changes at a district level in response. Last year, the Walton facility closed, bringing a district drop of around 100 students.
“Okay, it’s all based upon student enrollment. We also need to be able to pay our people, our teachers, our staff, and things of that nature. One of the pushes that I am really making hard is to get us to where we’re competitive from an area perspective, from a size, perspective, so that we can attract quality teachers and retain teachers,” Van Ranken said.
This element of competition has been responded to differently, schools closer to Wichita 259 increased salaries, some approaching the $50,000 mark for first-year teachers, a near $7,000 increase over Newton’s base salary.
“We have so many students that can go into the private sector and not necessarily public education, and get a job that pays a lot more than what it does to go into public education … I mean I look at what Newton is paying a first-year teacher, I look at Wichita, Maize, Andover, and Goddard. I look at all that stuff … we want the best, and pay is going to play a part in whether or not we’re able to attract the best teachers,” Valley Center Superintendent Greg Lehr said.
Newton schools are taking a similar approach to attracting new students to the district as well as talent retention. Administrators believe that a positive academic reputation as well as satisfied teachers will help curb the problem.
“What I want to do is make sure that we are attracting quality teachers and we’re retaining quality teachers too … we’re trying to increase student performance, and hopefully that can result, once again, I’m not focusing on the bringing of kids in as much as I want … I want the students to perform at a higher level academically,” Van Ranken said.
New policies under Kansas Bill 2567, which allows students to attend any public school in Kansas if there is space available, has allowed some districts to take on additional students “Last year, we dropped 240, this year we dropped 125 and we took 91 of our students through open enrollment, and so the drop would have been higher and then closer to the 200 plus that we saw last year, had we not taken students through open enrollment,” Hersh said.
Now that the issue of enrollment has made its presence known, schools are competing more than ever to attract new students and staff to combat this problem. Van Ranken said the landscape and educational environment has changed and different problems are going to arise to complement the falling enrollment. Only time will tell what these new problems will be.
“We generally try to cooperate with each other rather than compete against each other. That makes it difficult when the legislature puts in measures to force us to compete. Competition is fine for many things in life, but not for everything in life,” Van Ranken said.
