Parents long have worried about disappearing children. In 1816, the Brothers Grimm told the story of the children of the German town Hameln. According to legend, in 1284 a piper lured away a town’s plague rats for a fee, but the townspeople refused to pay. So the piper returned and led away 130 children, lost forever to the mountains.
So who or what is stealing Colorado’s children? Following are recent news headlines:
Colorado Sun: “Boulder Valley School District will close 4 schools as enrollment declines.” The “decision outraged parents.”
Coloradoan: Poudre School District “eying closures of 12 schools.”
Denver Post: “Adams 12 district recommends closing 6 schools to save $5 million.”
Denver7: “JeffCo school district says selling 21 closed schools would only cover half of one year of maintenance.”
CBS: “Douglas County School District parents, kids adjust to school consolidation.”
9News: “School closures are becoming a bigger issue across metro Denver.”
So what is the pied piper of Colorado? The term “pied” is helpful here, as it means multi-colored, as with a magpie. There isn’t just one reason for the losses.
Lower fertility
Brian Eschbacher, an “enrollment consultant” (and I didn’t even know that was a thing), told 9News the obvious: “Many school districts have fewer children living in them now than they had a decade or more ago.” But why? 9News paraphrases, “He said fewer births, housing costs and changing migration patterns are leaving many communities with fewer school-age children.”
People generally are having fewer kids. Last year the United Nations said fertility rates were in “unprecedented decline,” BBC reported.
Colorado’s Demography Office says Colorado’s total population went up between 2023 and 2024 and is expected to go up more to about 6.2 million people by 2030. The number of people ages 0 to 17, by contrast, fell and is expected to keep falling.
Last year, the Common Sense Institute noted that school closures are “primarily the result of falling birth and fertility rates.” CSI adds, “Colorado’s birth rate has been declining since 2005 and has fallen at a faster pace than the national average since 2011.”
So, for the most part, the problem is not something luring away families with kids; it is that fewer kids are born. But the moving part is still important.
Moving around and out of Colorado
Earlier this year, Erica Breunlin put together an informative article for the Sun, noting that, even with “overall enrollment in public schools plummeting,” “46 of the state’s 178 districts gained students this year, primarily in suburban and rural districts.” So part of what’s going on is families are moving to different districts.
Colorado also is losing some families to other states. The Demography Office reported in March that “some counties lost populations to other states or counties.” “High housing cost counties” were among those hit especially hard. Some counties also have lost migrants.
This leads to the completely unsurprising conclusion: Families that can’t afford to live in Colorado, or in certain parts of Colorado, will leave.
Private educational alternatives
Although, as the Colorado Department of Education notes, enrollment numbers in private schools are not well-reported, there’s some indication that private schools grew somewhat, at least as of a few years ago.
Likewise, there’s some indication that homeschooling numbers are up, although most people who say they “homeschool” actually are enrolled in private “umbrella” schools, so they’re not counted in the official homeschool stats.
It’s plausible, then, that a slice of the explanation is that more people are leaving the public schools, but, even if that’s the case, those numbers are dwarfed by demographic changes.
Regardless, if you’re tired of the academic mediocrity, the bullying, or the pedagogic and political fads, you might think about leaving too. As the father of a thriving homeschooled sixth grader, I can confidently say (depending on a family’s context), come on in, the water’s fine.
A problem of costs
Although the legislature has made some progress toward deregulating the housing market, the builders of housing continue to face costly regulatory and bureaucratic hurdles to increasing the supply. This raises prices and drives out families.
Government also continues to suppress the supply of child care through badly implemented regulations. Last year, the legislature passed SB26-020, concerning licensure. This bill created the “child care licensure task force . . . to study and report on recommendations for a streamlined child care licensure system in the state” (per the summary). The report is due next year.
We need some safeguards, but my sense is that the costs of regulatory burdens are unnecessarily high. I wish an investigative reporter would interview a few dozen childcare providers about bureaucratic burdens and evaluate the regulatory landscape. I’m not saying that over-regulation explains all of the problem, but I suspect it does tamp down supply.
Wage controls ensure that grandma can watch the kids for free, if she’s available, but she cannot watch them for $10 per hour, even if that arrangement would benefit both her and the parents, because that would violate the minimum-wage laws. This again drives up costs for some young working families.
It also would help if families could more-easily hire immigrants to provide live-in care, but that would require federal reforms, and again wage-control laws would suppress many mutually advantageous relationships. Government needs to watch out for genuine exploitation, but to a large degree government now forcibly prevents “capitalist acts among consenting adults.”
Given the fertility crisis, soon enough our country will be begging for immigrants and competing to get them.
If you want to personally do something to encourage parenthood, give away copies of Bryan Caplan’s book, “Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids,” to your young-adult friends.
It is cliché to say our children are our future. It is also true. We jeopardize our prosperous future insofar as dumb government policies drive up the costs of living, push out families, and discourage parenthood. What helps families is what helps us all: economic liberty. Play that tune, and the children will begin to return.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.