Chandler Unified School District, which draws students from parts of Gilbert and Queen Creek as well as Chandler, should expect to shrink by roughly 7,500 students over the next decade, the district's longtime demographers told its governing board, according to a report in the Queen Creek Independent.
Rick Brammer of Applied Economics and his assistant, Don Graves, gave their yearly demographic presentation to the board on Oct. 7. Brammer laid out two ends of a range. If the district kept losing 1.8% of its service rate each year, it would lose another 10,000 students by 2037, an outcome he said he did not expect as the voucher program saturates.
Holding its share near 62% and losing only 2,500 more was also unlikely, he said, which led him to the 7,500 figure.
Where the numbers stand
The district's most recent average daily membership is 38,119, the paper reported. That number was above 43,000 across the district's 40-plus campuses as recently as 2022, and Brammer said enrollment has fallen by 7,744 students since the start of the 2019-20 school year.
The gap starts at the youngest grades. This school year the district has 1,826 kindergartners and 4,047 high school seniors, Brammer said, a difference of about 2,200 before any other losses. Each new kindergarten class in the 2020s has been smaller than the one before.
He pointed to several causes: Arizona births, which fell by nearly a third from their 2006 peak and have settled at about 78,000 a year; families who left public schools during COVID-19 and did not return in higher-income districts; the growth of charter schools, many of them K-8; and fewer homeowners under 55.
About 10,500 students who live inside Chandler Unified's boundaries attend school somewhere else, he said, and the state's Empowerment Scholarship Account program has made enrollment harder to forecast.
