Enrollment Forecasts for Portland Public Schools Project Continued Decline

An annual enrollment forecast for Portland Public Schools by the Population Research Center at Portland State University shows a continuation in a trend district officials are all too familiar with: steadily declining enrollment.

The medium-growth enrollment forecast by PSU is based on 2024–25 school year enrollment numbers. The district reported 43,375 students in the last academic year, 630 less than PSU had forecast then. Accordingly, the newest forecast by PSU projects steeper losses in the district’s enrollment than projections from previous years.

The district is expected to lose about 9% of its students by the 2029–30 school year.

Enrollment numbers matter in large part because they determine how much state funding PPS will receive (districts are paid per student), so the declines will also influence the district’s budget, which has seen a series of cuts over the years.

As the district tries to reverse those trends, researchers identified a core problem: a declining number of youngest learners attending schools in the district. The kindergarten capture rate (how many children choose to enroll in PPS) was about 71% in fall 2024, higher than it was during the pandemic but much lower than a high of 86% in 2013. Simultaneously, there are fewer children to capture: the 4-to-5-year-old population has been in decline as a result of declining birth rates, something that’s “not expected to reverse,” PSU researchers wrote.

“The kindergarten and first grade capture rates are predictive of an age cohort’s future attachment to PPS,” the forecast says. “To maintain enrollment, PPS will need more school-age children in the district, or a higher share of the age-eligible population whose families choose to enroll in a PPS kindergarten or first-grade classroom.”

At this point, forecasters still expect a turnaround after the district hits a low point in enrollment in the 2034–35 school year, “as historically small entry classes from the COVID period age out.” But they note that such an assessment assumes the district will work to improve its capture rates. Under that scenario, researchers project enrollment could begin to recover in the 2040–41 school year.

District officials appear to be entering the school year with confidence that they can turn things around. PPS launched a Recruitment, Retention and Recovery enrollment campaign in March, which the district’s chief of communications, Candice Grose, has told WW is a data-driven effort to analyze declining trends. The district has been rolling out a public-facing campaign to emphasize the value of a PPS education and providing individualized marketing to each of its schools.

At a Wednesday morning press conference, PPS Superintendent Dr. Kimberlee Armstrong said she did not have updates to share on that enrollment campaign. Nor did she have updates on school closures, which she’s previously considered.

Instead, at a keynote address to educators and other district leaders preceding the press conference, Armstrong shared that the district is seeing some positive trends in student outcomes, which she hopes will translate into higher enrollment numbers. She also shared some school-specific data from the Oregon statewide assessment (those results will be released to the public in the fall), which showed some marked improvement in fourth grade reading, and may indicate that the district’s focus on early literacy is paying off.

“With the start of school just three weeks away, we are anticipating that we’re going to be able to fill all of the seats that we have available, if not immediately, [then] over time,” Armstrong told reporters. “You heard the Harriet Tubman [Middle School] principal talk about how his enrollment is exploding, and he’s seeing gains in his results, so I think there’s a lot of promising things happening. I’m just looking forward to us telling that story in a few short months.”

Portland School Board members also appear poised to take on the district’s enrollment challenges this academic year. They’ve revived a subcommittee on teaching, learning and enrollment, which new board member Rashelle Chase-Miller will chair.

Board Chair Eddie Wang tells WW that “enrollment issues” were one of the motivations for bringing back the committee. He says it will be up to Chase-Miller to establish the committee’s main goals.

In their report, researchers note that their forecasts are “by nature uncertain” and rely on certain assumptions, such as migration trends and capture rates. They emphasized that the forecast using 2023–24 enrollment data specifically overestimated how many kindergartners would enroll in the district but was generally accurate to the numbers PPS reported.

Dr. Ethan Sharygin, who leads the Population Research Center, has previously told WW he’s confident in his projections, which also reflect national trends of declining enrollment in schools. “I’d be very surprised,” he told WW in March, “if we’ve missed something large.”