Brewer planning for drop in school enrollment

BREWER – School officials are projecting a significant drop in enrollment in the next decade at Brewer High School, and they are beginning to plan for it.

The projections, produced by Planning Decisions of South Portland and distributed in June, are based on birth rates in Brewer and the number of students who historically have moved in and out of the school system.

“I think we need to start thinking downsizing,” business manager Lester Young said at the Jan. 8 Brewer School Committee meeting. “If you do a gradual downsizing, it’s not as painful. If you do it all at once, it’s painful.”

Some school officials from neighboring communities that send high school students to Brewer question the forecast. Approximately half of Brewer High School’s students are from these out-of-town communities.

“We had an increase in the number of high school tuition students” this year, said Gary Gonyar, Holbrook Middle School’s principal. “I’m averaging about 72 per grade [at the middle school], and what I’m hearing is there is a lot of new development here in Holden and Eddington.”

Holbrook Middle School is a part of SAD 63, encompassing Holden, Eddington and Clifton and the biggest contributor of students to Brewer, with 223 high school students enrolled this year.

Planning Decisions’ figures did not take into consideration Brewer’s plans for a new elementary or elementary-middle school or the development growth in the communities that send students to the high school, said Rebecca Wandell, Planning Decisions’ project manager for Brewer’s school enrollment projections.

Projections for nonresident students were based on how Brewer’s figures changed, she said, and were all within one digit of Brewer’s numbers.

“The reason they’re similar is because they’re based on … how many have come in the past and using the projections of Brewer students,” Wandell said. “It’s historic trends of historical enrollment. It’s a guess based on [Brewer’s] trends.”

The projections suggest a downward trend at Brewer High School from the current 900-plus student population to 800 by 2010, 773 students by 2015.

Young predicts an even sharper drop, to 704 students at the high school by 2010.

“Unless a lot of people start moving to Brewer, we’re pretty much destined for this number,” he told the school panel.

Part of the reason for Young’s numbers is that he based his figures on an annual freshman enrollment of 80 students, nine fewer students than this year’s number.

“That’s approximately half of the number of available [nonresident] students,” he said. “If we get 80 new tuition students every year, this is how it will turn out.”

There is no way to forecast accurately the number of sending-district students, because 19 communities or school systems send students to Brewer, and most outlying communities allow students to have a choice of schools to attend. A considerable number attend John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor, a private school.

“There were a lot of years in the ’70s that we were over 1,300 students,” Young said. “We did [at the time] have contracts with sending districts, including [SAD] 63, to send all their students here.”

The city School Department no longer has any sending-district contracts.

Brewer’s population, about 9,000, hasn’t changed much in the last decade, but residents with school-age children have dropped to around 17 percent of households.

“We are going to be a smaller school with fewer resources by 2015,” Brewer Superintendent Daniel Lee said at a recent School Committee meeting. “We are trying to find a way that makes this a smaller school but still a truly effective school to be proud of.”

Orrington’s Center Drive School is the second-largest contributor of high school students, with 115 enrolled this year. Principal Roy Allen said the number of Orrington graduates attending Brewer High School has decreased slightly this year because more are going to John Bapst, but he said his numbers are steady. He was unable to forecast how many would go to school in Brewer because the students have choices.

And even though the Planning Decisions projections say the high school population in Brewer is going to drop, in the past three years the number actually has increased. In April 2004, 860 students were enrolled at Brewer High; in April 2005, the figure was 874; and in April 2006, the number was 890.

This year, 919 enrolled at Brewer High in September.

To prepare for the projected drop in enrollment, the Brewer School Committee passed a new admission policy in September that gives school leaders the ability to screen out-of-town, tuition-paying students based on grades, attendance and discipline records.

Brewer school officials say the admissions policy is the first step in long-range planning that will cap the number of students at Brewer High School in an effort to control costs, which fluctuate annually based on the number of sending students and the annual tuition amount, set by the state each December.

“I just fear we’ll find ourselves in reactive mode” if action is not taken soon, Lee said at the January School Committee meeting. “This is complicated. This isn’t simple. The difficult thing is planning. … We don’t know how many students or how much we’re getting per students for the next year.

“It’s going to take some work on all our parts,” he added. “We’re not trying to paint a bleak picture, just an accurate picture.”