Months after approving one of the largest round of school closures in Cleveland’s history, the Cleveland Metropolitan School District is confronting a painful reality: Enrollment is likely to keep falling.
A new report projects the district will lose another 4,300 students — more than 13% — over the next decade, suggesting district leaders will have more painful decisions about programs and staffing in the years ahead.
The pace of decline is roughly on par with what CMSD has seen since 2016 and largely attributed to falling birthrates, which are impacting school district enrollment across the country.
The report, developed as part of the district’s long-term facilities planning effort with the state, found that CMSD started this past school year with 1,200 fewer students than the previous year. It anticipates it will start the upcoming, 2026-2027, school year with another 600-student loss.
The Ohio Facilities Construction Commission (OFCC), a state body that helps local districts fund school building renovation projects, commissioned the study as part of an agreement to end its partnership with CMSD once four in-process projects, including the new Glenville High School, are completed. That means, in the future, CMSD would be responsible for funding school constructions, renovations and demolitions by itself.
The district began working with the OFCC in 2001 and since then has built 43 new school buildings, renovated seven schools and demolished or abated 53 buildings. Their partnership is winding down because the OFCC hopes to work with every district across the state.
At a meeting where the board approved the agreement, board chair Sara Elaqad acknowledged that falling enrollment is a continuing challenge for the district.
“We’ve been talking about declining enrollment for some time. That’s why we started our school consolidation plan, with Building Brighter Futures,” she said. “And it’s something that districts across the country are grappling with.”
Falling birth rates mean fewer students in Cleveland and nationwide
FutureThink, the firm that completed the report, has worked with the OFCC and districts throughout the state to model future enrollment. It used information from a number of sources, including housing data and birth rates in Ohio and Cleveland, to formulate its predictions.
Nationally, there are fewer babies being born today than there were a decade ago, leading to public school enrollment declines throughout the country.
The number of babies born is a solid metric for projecting kindergarten enrollments because it helps to show overall trends, especially when paired with historical data that shows how many kids born in a given district enroll as kindergarteners.
Using historical enrollment trends, the study found that, on average, over the last 10 years around 27% of the children born in the district’s boundaries attended kindergarten at CMSD. That number has stayed relatively steady, fluctuating up or down by at most around 5 percentage points. Those trends not only look at the number of babies born but also account for families who move, choose to homeschool or send their children to charter or private schools.
Overall in Ohio, births declined from 2019 to 2024 by around six percent. At the same time, the number of students attending private schools has steadily trended up as the state has expanded voucher programs.
During the same time in Cleveland, the use of vouchers has risen slightly and the ZIP codes that make up CMSD have seen a 14% decrease in births. Pairing birth rate data along with historical data around enrollment and housing, the report projected a 13.6% enrollment decrease over the next ten years.
Marguerite Roza, a researcher at the Edunomics Lab, which has extensively studied public school district enrollment, staffing and spending trends, evaluated the report and found it used a reliable approach to model enrollment trends.
“If the birth rate trends in Ohio are sloping downward, they’re assuming that slope is mostly going to continue,” she told Signal Cleveland. “And right now, we don’t have any reason to think it wouldn’t.”
Roza also believes it’s “heavy on hope and light on reality” to assume CMSD could meaningfully increase enrollment by convincing families to leave private or charter schools. The report includes a note that “changes to state law that have made it easier [for] Cleveland kids to use vouchers” could “potentially influence school enrollment.”
Participation in the Cleveland Scholarship, the universal voucher available to all CMSD students, has steadily trended up over the last 10 years. An increase in voucher use, though, doesn’t necessarily mean more students are choosing private schools over public ones, just that more students are using vouchers. In Ohio, more broadly, non-public school enrollment increased by around 11% between the 2020-2021 to 2024-2025 school years.
Enrollment declines means CMSD has to be ‘nimble’
Cleveland is just off the heels of a painful process which shuttered 18 schools entirely, as part of right-sizing the district, but Roza warned that the current consolidation is likely “not a one and done.”
Falling enrollment will continue to create financial pressure as funding is based on the number of students a district enrolls. CMSD is also already in precarious financial straits and, even with recent layoffs and school closures, projects a negative bank balance crop up again in 2029.
That means district leaders will be left with a handful of deeply unpopular choices: closing schools, cutting programming, laying off staff or refusing to raise salaries.
“If districts are shrinking, it’s not like they shrink and then we close some schools and, phew, we’re done,” Roza said. “Shrinking is now an annual issue, and it’s going to happen year after year. It doesn’t mean they have to close schools every year, but it does mean they have to get nimble.”
Part of being flexible, Roza said, is making sure that districts have the foresight to not disrupt the same groups of kids with school closures twice and to keep having proactive conversations with families about what falling enrollment means.
“You have to be in a constant state of perpetual conversation with the community,” she said. “And, you know, helping people understand why we can’t make commitments that a school will be there forever.”
