Elmhurst Schools See Drop In Enrollment

ELMHURST, IL — Elmhurst School District 205 projected about 100 more students this last school year, but the district instead saw a loss of more than 250 students, or a 3 percent decrease, a top official said Tuesday.

The pandemic is believed to have had an effect on enrollment. Officials have said previously that some parents took their children out of the public schools and moved them into private schools, which were offering more in-person learning.

Elmhurst Patch recently filed a request for any records showing how many District 205 students switched to private schools. The district said it had no such documents.

At Tuesday's school board meeting, interim Superintendent Linda Yonke said the district's replacement of two schools and renovations of others may well bring in more students.

"Every school will look like new within the next five years," Yonke said. "We think that the schools will be attractive to young families deciding whether to move and looking at the state of our facilities."

She gave a number of examples at local schools where enrollment should be up next fall. For instance, Jackson Elementary enrolled 77 kindergarteners last year. That class is set to increase to 90 for first grade next school year.

Board member Jim Collins said it's hard to predict big demographic changes.

"If you look at the (enrollment) of 205 over the last 50 years, it has ranged from a low of approximately 5,000 to a high of 10,000 students," he said. "When we went from 10,000 to 5,000 in a small number of years, we closed and sold a lot of schools."

In 2020, the district's enrollment was 8,563, according to the Illinois Report Card website.