"Bursting at the Seams?"

"Building is out of control in this town!" Okay. "Why must there be apartment buildings on every available piece of land?" I hear you. "We can't keep adding houses everywhere; the schools are bursting at the seams!" Now you've lost me.

Counting the number of students in the schools and predicting how many there will be tomorrow - or five years from now - is fundamental to a well-run district. So why is it so hard? And why is there so much confusion?

After nearly sixteen years of service as a school board member in New Jersey, I conclude that the confusion is on purpose.

Education of the K-12 variety has become an industry. And the industry needs customers. Unlike other industries - where a dwindling customer base would be taken care of by a free market - the government schools have no pressure to scale down. All they want to do is keep the train on the tracks. If enrollment isn't growing, it's hard to justify increased spending - so they have to pretend.

The Hillsborough Township, New Jersey School District currently has 7,226 students across its nine schools. That is 435 FEWER students than the peak year when there were 7,661 students in the district. That was 2005 - EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO. 

Yet I constantly hear that the schools are "bursting at the seams." How can this be? More importantly, why did the rampant development in the town over the past twenty years not cause a tremendous INCREASE in enrollment but instead result in a DECREASE? And finally, why are there so many that don't know the truth?

We can answer the second question first with what sounds like a copout - the "rampant development" just didn't happen. The question is flawed. In this case, you actually can't believe your lying eyes. Hillsborough's population increased by a relatively paltry 6,000 between 2000 and 2020. That's a mere 18%. As a comparison, between 1970 and 1990, the township's population increased from 11,000 to nearly 29,000 - an 18,000-person, 160% increase! Those were the decades of "rampant development" - not the past 20 years.

Even so, shouldn't a population increase of 6,000 add some students to the school system? Yes - and it did, at first. School enrollments increased between 2000 and 2005 before heading in the other direction and bottoming out at 7,126 in 2015. Birth rates in Hillsborough simply did not keep pace with all of the new bedrooms being built. In 2002, the Auten Road Elementary School was doubled in size to become the Auten Road Intermediate School (grades 5-6), and the final of three major additions was completed at the high school, doubling its capacity from the original building of 1969. There have been no projects to increase school capacity since that time.

So, if there are 435 fewer students enrolled now than in 2005, and school capacity has remained the same, why is there a prevalent narrative that says the schools are overcrowded? The answer is that over the past 18 years, the state has changed the definition of full capacity. In other words, you no longer have what you paid for.

For example, in 2001, when voters went to the polls to approve the construction projects at ARIS and the high school, they were told that the project would increase the high school capacity from 2,100 to 2,600 students. Yet today, the state uses something called Facility Efficiency Standards to calculate that the current high school has a capacity of 1,517. Somewhere along the line, the residents of Hillsborough have lost space for over 1,000 students. That is space that they paid for - and it's all gone. 

The same is true of every school in the district. What we thought were elementary schools with a maximum enrollment of 600 are now down to an FES maximum of around 400. This is a real kick to longtime residents who paid for the schools to be built and expanded numerous times.

One last note...over the years, Hillsborough has commissioned demographic studies to predict and plan for future enrollment. Despite the fact that their entire business is built on PREDICTION, they have a mountain of excuses when their prognostication fails. In Hillsborough's case, they consistently predict a far more significant increase in school-aged children than what actually occurs - and they are resistant to any retroactive studies to see how their predictions have fared in the past. Another board member and I tried several times to get a demographer to look back on past predictions and hold themselves to account but faced nothing but poor excuses. 

The 2018 Enrollment Projection and Facility Utilization Study predicted an enrollment of 7,723 students for the 2023-24 school year. As reported at a December 2023 school board meeting, current enrollment is 7,226.