D159 Looks at Dropping Enrollment: The Breakdown

At the end of this school year, 239 eighth-graders will be leaving .

Only 130 new kindergartners will be coming in to replace them.

If predictions for the 2012-13 school year come to pass, the district will see its eighth straight year of enrollment drops.

Estimates Superintendent Steve Stein presented to the board Thursday night could put next year enrollment at a meager 1,637 students. That's nearly a 30-percent drop from the enrollment during the district's peak 2004-05 school year.

So what is the drop, why is it happening and, most importantly, what does it mean?

What are the enrollment numbers?

Figures courtesy Mokena School District 159

Why are they going down? 

Most of Mokena's growth came during the housing boom of the 1990s. During that decade, grunge ruled the airwaves and Mokena's population went from 6,128 to 14,583, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Those new Mokenans sent their kids to D159 schools. The influx meant a space crunch.

In 1995, the district combined the two Willowcrest school to make one larger and, in 2001, opened , turning the old one into .

The kids got older and moved on to schools, then to college or the real world.

Normally, a lot more new students would be replacing the old ones, but the housing market crumbled. A lot of the empty nesters who would have moved into smaller places after selling their homes to families with young kids simply couldn't find buyers.

This left the district with buildings designed for more crowded times.

Another factor is , Stein said. Since the popular program was cut, the incoming kindergarten classes dropped to about 130 students.

The current second-grade class, the last to have all-day kindergarten as an option, is 180 students.

What does this mean?

For starters, it means it takes fewer employees to run the school. Stein thinks the district can shave off another teaching position by only replacing six of the seven teachers set to retire this summer.

The district currently has 204 employees (teachers, office and maintenance staff, aides, etc.), down from 262 in the 2007-08 school year.

To be clear, it was the district's deficit (then $2.7 million, now less than $200,000) and not declining enrollment that . But either way, the district was running smaller schools with smaller staffs.

More immediately, the declining enrollment leaves the district with some space to fill.

Next week, the district is holding a public forum to get input on whether to close the intermediate school, rent out part of the intermediate school or rent out part of the elementary school.

The forum will be 7 p.m. Jan. 19 at Mokena Intermediate School. All members of the public are welcome.