Step right up, folks. You’ll want to have your popcorn and refreshments ready to watch next week’s entertainment at the semi-monthly ABSS school board meeting.
We’ll bet dimes to a donut that you’re going to see and hear wailing and gnashing of teeth among school officials about the existing (and forthcoming) “overcrowding” in ABSS schools.
This is all merely a ploy to get ready for the next proposed bond referendum that school officials want to lay the groundwork for in order to raise tens of millions more for school construction.
It is always quite amazing to us how officials come up with the conclusion that schools are overcrowded, since overall ABSS enrollment has been stagnant, or declining, in recent years.
The reason we think it’s likely to be entertaining, however, is that it’s going to be difficult to make the case for overcrowded schools. But then facts have rarely stopped ABSS officials from pontificating and bloviating about all they want to do – always “for the children,” don’t you know.
Here are the facts you probably won’t hear mentioned, or certainly not in any relevant context.
- Enrollment in ABSS schools has gone down over the past seven years, since the taxpayers were last asked to spend millions – $150 million, to be precise – for a round of construction for ABSS schools, primarily at the high school level.
We’re not making this up. These are the hard numbers on students enrolled in the school system, as reported to the state Department of Public Instruction by the Alamance-Burlington School System: down 517 students overall from 2018-2019 to last year (2024-2025).
Most of that 2018 bond money went to the high school level, with only two projects at elementary schools.
- In order to make the current situation look more dire, however, school consultants hired by the school system are probably going to say enrollment at many schools is approaching “capacity,” by which most people would think they’re talking about the maximum number of students who could attend each school.
What they almost certainly won’t want to talk about is why those capacity levels keep shrinking. (The fact that the same batch of consultants are consistently hired to consistently misstate and overstate the enrollment will surely not be mentioned.) For instance, according to one report (2015) from the same group, ABSS was projected to have had 23,445 students by the 2024-2025 school year – or 1,530 more students than ABSS actually had.
These capacity studies and enrollment projections are, historically and consistently, way off! (And in one direction: overstating projected long-range enrollment.) But don’t count on anyone at ABSS in 2025 to question anything that undermines the mantra of “crowded schools.”
ABSS officials have redefined the capacity to shrink the capacity of the very same elementary school buildings that existed seven years ago by a whopping 1,119 students – or about the size of two elementary schools.
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In the past, ABSS officials have tried to blame the state for redefining “classroom” size or other criteria as the cause for reduced capacity. But as far as we can tell, there’s been no DPI change in school facility guidelines over the past seven years.
And, by the way, the shrinkage is even more dramatic if one eliminates the increased capacity at the two elementary schools where expansions (South Mebane) and renovations (at Pleasant Grove) were funded by the 2018 bond referendum. The elementary school capacity shrinkage swells to 1,245 if those two schools are removed from the calculations.
Fully 20 of 33 schools shrank in the capacity over the past seven years, if one is believe ABSS capacity figures that school board members will look at during Tuesday’s so-called “work session,” which actually often serves as a “practice” meeting before their regular monthly meeting two weeks later.
After all, even school officials would have a hard time making a pitch for new school construction if they admitted that there are more than a thousand empty seats at the elementary level – and, oh, just by the way, the “capacity” at the middle school level has also shrunk, by another 226 empty seats.
- Get ready for the “growth-is-everywhere” rhetoric. Yes, Alamance County has been growing. There is a proverbial boom in residential construction from Gibsonville to Mebane.
But count on school officials to ignore several important details in the footnotes to growth, however. First, some of the growth is on the other side of the county lines – and therefore not the responsibility of Alamance County taxpayers. Both Gibsonville and Mebane have seen real spurts in growth, to be sure, but much of that has been on the Guilford County side of Gibsonville and the Orange County side of Mebane – lots of development up Lebanon Road in the northern part of Mebane (and Orange County) and Old Hillsborough/Bowman roads (also in Orange County).
Second, and this is a point that we acknowledge runs counter to long-term history, experience, and expectation. But we’ve covered and watched enough city council meetings to believe it. Developers have consistently noted to local city councils that much of the current housing demand is among two opposite ends of the spectrum who don’t have school-aged children: older residents and young singles or young couples.
Yes, there are lots of townhouses, apartments, and even some significant single-family home developments. But many of these cater to residents without children.
The accuracy of the developers’ assessments should be evident by the clearly-observable trends in ABSS enrollment: the number of school-aged children is down.
Another factor which has suppressed the growth in ABSS enrollment is dramatic increases in enrollment among schools providing an alternative approach – both charter schools, private and Christian schools, and even parents who have decided to home school.
This trend is particularly evident since the statewide school shutdown at the height of the pandemic, which closed ABSS schools for a full year, from March 2020 until March 2021.
Oh, we’re sure we’re about to hear a heavy dose of “more growth is coming.” The most amusing examples are those that attribute some sort of student growth due to the forthcoming Buc-ee’s travel stop in Mebane (which, as we understand it, is a haven for tourists, not ABSS students) and any one of several industrial sites in adjacent counties.
Yes, it is true there are a few crowded schools – most notably Southern Middle and Garrett Elementary, both supposedly over capacity by 64 students each (or about two classrooms’ worth of students).
But those two schools and Eastlawn (allegedly with 15 too many students) are the only current schools where enrollment during the past school year was over the school’s supposed capacity, even with the reduced definitions of what constitutes “capacity.” (Williams High School was right on the nose, 1,208, in both enrollment and capacity.)
Which, by the way, continues to baffle us. If Walter Williams could accommodate 1,704 students in 1969 (we found a news account at the time with school officials describing that as the size of the student body), why is it now full with 1,208 students? Almost 500 fewer students with no change to the basic layout of the building? Even “new math” doesn’t make that add up.
So most objective observers would say the solution – at least for anyone looking for the most cost-effective approach – would be to redistrict to balance enrollment. With Cummings under capacity by almost 400 and Southern under by 346 – both adjacent to the Williams zone – it should be fairly obvious that revising Williams’ district boundaries could easily fix that emerging “overcrowding” issue.
Similarly, Garrett’s existing overcrowding can be addressed by looking no further than the space available at adjacent elementary school attendance zones: primarily the recently-expanded South Mebane, with 161 empty seats. But even a more broad approach shows that also significantly under capacity (even with the revised definitions) is B. Everett Jordan (under by 102).
In the case of Eastlawn, the adjacent zone (Andrews) has 144 empty seats. Other nearby schools – at Newlin, Smith, and Hillcrest –have a total of more than 200 empty seats.
So grab your refreshments. We suspect next week’s meeting is just the beginning of a year’s worth of entertainment as school officials begin their campaign to try to finagle more money from already hard-pressed taxpayers to justify more spending for fewer students.
And we won’t even delve into the obvious disappointment that no matter how much is spent – on buildings, roofs, HVAC, teacher salaries, special programs, or anything else – there’s been no discernible improvement in measurable academics in many years.
