It’s pretty painful when your local elementary school or middle school shuts down, forcing your child to change schools and maybe travel much farther away. This is increasingly the norm these days thanks to two related phenomena: the baby bust that began in 2008 and the 2020-2021 COVID-related school closures.
“’School districts may have to get smaller,’ she said. ‘It’s something that we are all grappling with, every single state.’““Warwick closed two schools to consolidate in 2016. Since then, enrollment has fallen another 10%.” From 1998 to today, school enrollment in Warwick is down by 33%. In Providence, enrollment is down more than 20%.
Eighteen years of fewer and fewer births means many fewer potential students for the public schools in every grade K-12. It also means that each grade is generally smaller than the one above it. There’s no promise of this trend reversing in the future. The birth control pill is an obvious contributor to our baby bust, not merely because it allows women to avoid unwanted pregnancies but because after a generation, it set a tone in the culture that we can and should make our lives neat and tidy, without intrusions from other people and free from the “tyranny of [our] own biology,” as some put it.This was the same mindset that dominated during COVID. The actual virus was something of a stand-in for the alive.