Denver Public Schools officials warned Thursday that more school closures are coming and board members worry the message isn’t getting through.

“I’m concerned that people aren’t paying attention to this and by the time the next school closures roll around, they won’t be aware,” Board of Education President Carrie Olson said.

With birth rates continuing a downward trend, the district anticipates “another 10+ years of steady but manageable enrollment declines,” according to the analysis.

“In this case, it is a reasonable expectation for additional school closures and boundary consolidations above and beyond action taken in November of 2024,” the report said.

Superintendent Alex Marrero, however, is constrained by how frequently he can propose school closures to the board of education. Executive Limitation 18 — also known as EL-18 — limits school closures to once every three years. It also restricts the superintendent from using low enrollment and test scores as the sole justification for closing a school.

Still, the data behind the district’s warning is sobering.

Among the findings:

• Enrollment declines are forecasted for all but one of the district’s planning regions, with three — central, northwest and southwest — expected to see drops by more than 10%.

• The far northeast is the only region projected to see any growth in the number of students by 2029 with the Denver International Airport and Gateway neighborhoods driving the increases.

• While the percentage of schoolchildren eligible for free lunch — a poverty indicator — has declined, these and Latino students are expected to be overrepresented among the district’s shrinking schools.

If the projections are realized, additional school closures could be needed within the next five years in central, northwest and southwest Denver, according to the strategic report.

While projections show a continued contraction in those regions, officials recommend expanding the capacity in the Gateway neighborhood by creating a plan for up to 900 middle school seats.

Despite these troubling signs, Early Childhood Education (ECE) enrollment saw a nearly 6% bump in 2024, the highest number since 2019.

ECE — which is primarily although not exclusively geared for low-income families — includes preschool programs for 3- and 4-year-olds and is often the first point of entry into the district. The district’s numbers bear this out: 86% enroll in kindergarten the following year.

The enrollment numbers used to justify the closures — two days after voters approved a nearly $1 billion bond that promised “something for every school” — excluded roughly 5,000 ECE students.

In a sworn affidavit for a lawsuit challenging the closures, Heather Covey, the district’s director of planning, analysis and real estate, said officials excluded this enrollment “because not every school has an ECE program.”

The omitted ECE data is among several decisions raising questions about how the district has handled enrollment figures to justify closures.

The lawsuit also accuses DPS of improperly using a financing scheme to bypass the Colorado Constitution’s ban on assuming public debt without voter approval. For decades, district officials have employed a workaround widely used in public finance circles but little understood by the public: transferring ownership of schools to a corporation, then leasing the buildings back for hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

Officials have been warning about the need to shrink the district’s footprint amid declining enrollment. Declining birth rates, skyrocketing home costs, and gentrification have been widely cited as the primary factors driving declining enrollment.

Colorado’s birth rate has been on a downward trend since 2005, falling faster than the national average since 2011, according to a report last month released by the Common Sense Institute. Colorado, the report found, is projected to lose roughly 15,000 children over the next five years.

Founded in 2010, the institute is a nonprofit organization in Greenwood Village that conducts fiscal and economic research.

Last year, the board of education approved closing seven schools and reconfiguring three others — impacting about 2,400 students — to save roughly $6 million annually.

District data shows that overall enrollment in DPS peaked in 2019. While district officials have said that elementary enrollment has shown the steepest declines, the data in the strategic plan indicates that middle schools experienced the greatest drop at -9.6% from 2019 to 2024.

Elementary and ECE campuses saw roughly the same drop at -2.3% and -2.4%, respectively, while high schools across the district had a -1.9% enrollment decline.

The district’s middle schools experienced a 4.8% increase.

Despite all the handwringing, DPS actually saw enrollment numbers increase in two consecutive years.

New students — fueled by an immigration crisis that saw more than 40,000 immigrants come to Denver over an 18-month span — temporarily buoyed the district’s enrollment.

In Colorado, public school funding is directly tied to student enrollment. As enrollment declines, so does the amount of state money districts receive.