Bridging the Enrollment Gap: Strategies for Thriving Schools

Declining enrollment in K-12 schools presents significant challenges, including reduced budgets, shifting demographics, and increased competition from alternative education options. To effectively address these issues, schools and districts can adopt a strategic framework focusing on three key areas:

1. Awareness: Engaging Families and Encouraging Applications

To attract and encourage families to apply, schools should:

• Embrace Innovative Enrollment Solutions: Utilize data-driven tools to identify enrollment patterns, analyze demographic trends, and predict future needs. For instance, real-time analytics can reveal why families are choosing alternative education options, enabling schools to tailor marketing and outreach efforts effectively.

• Adopt Family-Centric Processes: Ensure enrollment processes are accessible by offering mobile-friendly platforms, reducing the number of steps required, and providing support options such as in-person assistance or dedicated helplines. Another point to consider is the number of questions you’re asking. With each question requiring approximately 30 seconds to complete, more questions can lead to more abandoned forms.

• Measure Attribution to go Beyond “Spray and Pray” Marketing: With so many marketing channels to leverage, being smart about focus and dollar allocation is key. Data-driven insights can not only help you better spend your money, but be used to create personalized marketing campaigns that resonate with specific demographics. Highlighting unique school programs, success stories, and community impact through social media, email campaigns, and local events can attract families and spark interest – but it’s important to measure which tactics are working. And it’s possible without expensive tooling: even just asking where families heard about you can help refine your plans.

2. Accept: Facilitating Acceptance into Best-Fit Schools

Once families are engaged, it's crucial to guide them toward acceptance into schools that best fit their needs:

• Close Equity Gaps in Enrollment: Use data to identify communities most at risk of being left behind and develop policies that ensure all families have access to quality educational opportunities, regardless of socioeconomic status or geography. Equity-focused strategies can help mitigate the long-term effects of enrollment declines on vulnerable populations.

• Adapt to Shifting School Preferences: Offer specialized programs, such as STEM, arts, or dual-language immersion, and create flexible schedules or hybrid learning models to appeal to diverse family preferences. By aligning offerings with family needs, public schools can position themselves as compelling options within the education landscape.

• Consider Ranking or a Single-Best-Offer Approach: One way to simplify the acceptance process is to provide families with the opportunity to ranks schools. This approach, especially when paired with a single-best-offer, can consolidate offers across multiple schools into clear, prioritized options, reducing the complexity for families navigating the enrollment process, and improving acceptance rates and timelines for schools. In Newark, NJ, for example, schools participating in the Newark Common App have seen acceptance rates increase by up to 20%, and in Kansas City, MO, schools saw a 37% decrease in first day no-shows after implementing single-best-offer!

3. Attend: Ensuring Engagement from Day One and Beyond

Maintaining student engagement is essential for sustained enrollment:

• Work to Build Confidence: Engage with families regularly through open forums, town halls, and surveys. Highlight success stories and positive outcomes within the community, and be transparent about challenges and how they’re being addressed. When families feel heard and see evidence of improvement, they are more likely to choose and remain committed to public schools.

• Strategic Resource Allocation: Use enrollment data to predict future trends and avoid overbuilding or underutilizing facilities. Prioritize investments in programs and services that have the greatest impact on student success, and engage with communities to ensure that resource decisions reflect shared priorities and values. Proactive planning can help districts and schools turn financial challenges into opportunities for innovation and growth.

By focusing on these areas—raising awareness, facilitating acceptance, and ensuring ongoing engagement—schools can develop a comprehensive strategy to bridge the enrollment gap and build stronger, more resilient education systems for the future.