StatShot: Is Your District's Enrollment Slipping?

Declining enrollment at schools can mean empty halls and reductions in staff and, in the cases of and , could contribute to closing schools.

Current Summit Hill projections for the 2012-13 school year will have at 359 students below capacity. Mokena is preparing to graduate 239 eighth-graders in the spring. The next fall, only 130 kindergartners will be coming to replace them.

Smaller classes will eventually make their way to Lincoln-Way 210, a district where the most-recently opened school, Lincoln-Way West was at less than half of its 2,500-student capacity during the 2010-11 school year.

D210 has opened two new schools since 2008 to accomodate the now-teenaged children whose parents moved to the area during the 1990s housing boom. And future years could see fewer incoming freshmen if numbers like Mokena's become the norm.

Not all of the feeder districts are slipping. Here are the five most recent available enrollments for the L-Way feeder districts:

Bear in mind that these numbers come from the Illinois State Board of Education's District Report Cards, which measures the enrollment in the fall.

Students who transferred out or in after classes started are not included in these numbers. That's why you'll sometimes hear different numbers from the districts than the ones in the chart above, like .

Hopeful? Fearful? Tell us in the comments what these numbers mean to you.

Search our Patch Places directory for more information on the following districts:

Correction: This story initially listed Mary Drew Elementary in the wrong district. Patch regrets the error.