Brian Keegan: Boulder’s next political divide is generational — and already visible in school enrollment trends

Brian Keegan is a regular opinion columnist for Boulder Reporting Lab. His “Charting Boulder” column uses public data to make sense of how the city is changing — from housing and politics to income and population — with clear explanations and a focus on equity.

Boulder families are entering the Hallow-Thanks-Mas scramble that always upends the barely settled routines of a new school year. But beneath this bustle, families with school-age children, like mine, can already feel what the data confirms: Boulder’s classrooms and playgrounds are getting emptier. 

To get a handle on the numbers about changing enrollments, I used data from Colorado’s Department of Education, which squirrels away historical grade-level student statistics from 1986 to the present in a mix of PDFs and Excel files. 

Enrollment in the Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) peaked in 2017 and has fallen ever since, accelerated by a combination of demographics and the Covid-19 pandemic. The St. Vrain Valley School District (SVVSD) has overtaken BVSD by doubling its enrollment in less than 25 years, though its growth now also appears to be leveling off.

This is not a surprise to attentive policymakers. BVSD has a dedicated topic on declining enrollments and established a Long Range Advisory Committee in 2022 to consider strategies for managing the domino effects of smaller enrollments on funding, staffing and facilities. But their annual enrollment forecasts may understate the severity of what’s coming.

Let’s first establish a link between two separate but related datasets: enrollments and age estimates. I filtered the State Demography Office’s single-year age estimates of Boulder County’s population to ages 5-18 for 1990-2050. These already account for factors like changing birth and migration rates that BVSD also uses in its modeling.

The scatterplot shows an undeniable correlation between Boulder County’s school-age population and BVSD enrollments between 1990 and 2024: a larger school-age population is correlated with more BVSD students. The recent decline in school-age population mirrors the district’s enrollment slide.

Using the SDO data of Boulder County’s school-age population, I estimated a simple linear regression model on its historical relationship with BVSD enrollment. Then I extrapolated this model using SDO’s forecasts through 2050 to estimate future BVSD enrollment. The results are stark.

Comparing the model’s historical predictions (red) to actual enrollments (blue) shows a close fit. The model forecasts BVSD enrollment will continue declining until bottoming out around 22,000 students in 2035, a number last seen in 1990. That’s a loss of 9,000 students — or 30% below the 2017 peak — in less than 20 years. 

While there is a modest rebound as the children of Gen Z and Gen Alpha parents (therefore Gen X and Millennial grandparents!) start school between 2035 and 2050, the totals peak at only 24,000 around 2050 before declining again.

As a father whose sons will graduate in the high school classes of 2037 and 2042, these numbers are not idle abstractions. They imply a harrowing shift toward fewer peers, fewer educators and fewer resources.

Because BVSD uses cohort component methods for forecasting enrollments, I explored some historical cohort dynamics. In the heatmap below, each column represents a BVSD kindergarten cohort starting between 1986 to 2023. The values show the increase (green) or decrease (red) in the number of students in that cohort from one grade to the next until graduation 12 years later. 

The heatmap is best read bottom to top by column: the kindergarten fall cohort of 1986 had 178 more first graders in 1987, 15 more second graders in 1988, and so on. The subsequent kindergarten fall cohorts of 1987, 1988 and so on appear in the adjacent columns.

Certain grade transitions (kindergarten to first grade, fifth to sixth, eighth to ninth) consistently bring surges of students, likely moving into BVSD schools from private or home schools. The effects of the pandemic in fall 2020 left an unmistakable scar (the red diagonal on the right), as hundreds of students across almost every cohort disappeared from BVSD rolls and never came back. 

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, high school enrollment collapsed (red cluster, upper left), likely due to a combination of Broomfield’s 2000 departure from Boulder and Colorado’s 1995 open enrollment law, which allowed families to “vote with their minivans” and attend schools in other districts.

Meanwhile, the explosion of Boulder’s over-65 population as the school-age population declines creates an unavoidable intergenerational tension. We’ve already crossed an inflection point: There are now more elders than students in Boulder County. Where there were once two school-age children for every elder, soon there will be two elders for every school-age child.

The politics of education funding will become even more fraught as elders on fixed incomes are asked to support expensive institutions that fewer people use. On one hand, elders have real and growing needs of their own, and voters should decide how our tax revenue is spent. 

On the other hand, a Boulder which already ignores how its policies affect communities in other places will likely also ignore how its policies affect communities in other times — future communities that someone’s grandchildren will have to lead. Absent a shift in values and priorities, Boulder risks hollowing itself out and becoming an exclusive retirement community outsourcing consequences elsewhere and elsewhen.

These dynamics are the result of both demographic trends no one can control and policy choices we continue to make — choices that keep our housing scarce, childcare expensive, streets unsafe and institutions underfunded. Those decisions will soon be made by an older, more politically active majority. Families and young people will increasingly find themselves living within someone else’s democracy.

Public schools are far more than free childcare with a side of education; they are the heart of neighborhoods, a foundation of civic life and the truest investment in our future. The challenge before us is not simply to manage the retreat toward smaller and fewer schools, but to preserve an intergenerational social contract. 

Communities with more elders than children will face hard choices about whether to prioritize their own needs now or the needs of strangers yet to come. Welcoming future generations, and their families who raise them, remains Boulder’s best investment, especially in uncertain times like these.

The data and code for replicating these analyses can be found on GitHub.