Enrollment factors: birth rates, alternatives to public school, and the costs of living in NHC
Public schools are mainly funded through student enrollment numbers. It’s a high-stakes funding model as a majority of school districts across the state see declines in their student populations. Over the past decade, NHCS has seen a 10% decline in student enrollment.
“It's not necessarily all my fault when I see that these numbers aren't changing. So we have to play the hand we're dealt, right? So we either get more kids, get more money, or reduce our overhead,” Barnes said.
Data from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) show that over ten years, only 15 of the 115 school districts in the state have increased student enrollment. At the top of that list is Pender County Schools, with a 15% increase; Brunswick County Schools comes in 4th with 9%. [Editor’s Note: You can view Barnes’ analysis of the NCDPI student enrollment over a decade at the end of this report.]
The state student enrollment average has decreased by 7% over the last decade. New Hanover County Schools sits in the middle of the pack of school districts, retaining about 90% of its student population since the 2016-2017 school year (put another way, it’s lost about 10% of its enrollment).
Barnes attributes that to a combination of factors: falling birth rates, families moving to those surrounding counties of Pender and Brunswick because of costs, and the state monetarily incentivizing the Opportunity Scholarship program.
“I think it is a shared issue between the cost of living in Wilmington, and the fact that we are seeing less kindergartners come in, and I cannot find where they're going,” he said. “So when I look at birth rate analysis nationwide, the replacement birth rate [used to be] 2.1 children per adult female, and it's now down to 1.6.”
Other factors involved could be families delaying having children because of careers and the overall state of the economy.
“We have to pivot on the fact that if the trend we're currently experiencing continues, then that is going to mean that we are going to have another 1,000 less kids in the next five years than we have now,” he said.
Barnes said he’s had to do his own analysis on enrollment figures because, at this point, the Cropper GIS study is “not correct from what we’re seeing at the moment.” They are a consulting firm that conducted an NHCS enrollment and school population study in 2023.
Competition among private and public schools?
Barnes said that while the cost of living and declining birth rates are factors in declining enrollments in New Hanover County, so are increases in alternatives to public schools like charters, homeschooling, and private schools, albeit those are not as big a factor as he once thought.
“The Opportunity Scholarship does play a role. We just still don't know the significance. [...] I don't even think it's necessarily the prevailing factor [in the declining enrollment picture], not when I found that 92% of the kids that are utilizing Opportunity Scholarships weren't ours to begin with,” he said.
The more he dug into the data, he said, the more he saw that those alternatives weren’t getting as many students as he once thought. According to the data Barnes gathered, the total number of students in alternative schools has decreased slightly since 2022.
“So over the last four years, charter schools have only gone up about 200 kids over the course of the last four years. Virtual charter has gone up about 20. Homeschool has actually gone down by almost 1,000, and private school has really only gone up about 400 [students] over the last four years,” he said.
According to data compiled by the North Carolina State Education Assistance Authority, which oversees the Opportunity Scholarship program, two years ago, 309 students used $1.8 million in state funding in private schools located in New Hanover County. Fast forward to this year, 2,334 students used $11.8 million to attend those schools.
As superintendent of the 12th-largest public school district in the state, Barnes has been outspoken about the need for similar accountability standards for all schools that receive state funding – in other words, an apples-to-apples standard for those private schools receiving scholarship funding that can be compared to public schools.
“That narrative is that we're afraid of competition; we’re not afraid of competition. I think we stand up really well against all that. My concern is that the standards aren't the same, so competition implies an equal playing field,” he said.
He added that those private schools that accept scholarship funds should be subject to public records requests, and the community should know their test scores.
Barnes also noted that the legislature needs to make public school funding its priority.
“You guys [the legislature] fund Opportunity Scholarships as much as you want, but fund public schools first, because that's your responsibility,” he said.
Back in 2024, state Senator Michael Lee told WHQR that he was hoping to work with NCDPI on a “nationally normed test for third, eighth, and 11th grade that is taken across all schools, traditional charter, any school that's receiving state funds. The reason we couldn't go ahead and do that right away, is because federal law requires us to do certain things in the third grade and eighth grade [...] and of course testing based on the standard course of study.”
WHQR reached out to Lee and to an NCSEAA spokesperson, the administrative body that produces information and metrics about the Opportunity Scholarship program, to ask what progress had been made on these normed tests. We will update the story when we hear back.
Upcoming budget discussions with county, state
Barnes said he and the school board continue to advocate for NHCS with the General Assembly.
“I have met with all of our legislators, personally, individually. I've written letters. I'm going to Raleigh twice this month. I'm on a statewide weighted student funding formula forum,” he said.
Barnes has been advocating for the legislature to change the outdated funding formula. The New Hanover County school board also passed a more specific resolution asking the General Assembly to change how many exceptional children (EC) staff they provide to schools.
Barnes said the state charter for public education outlines that the legislature needs to fund staffing, and the local government, in this case, New Hanover County, should financially support capital and operating costs.
“There is not a district I've ever been in that hasn't had to use some of its local [funding] to offset staffing,” he said.
On average across the state, about 60% of instructional funding comes from the state, 23% from local government, and 17% from the federal government (excluding capital expenses like new facilities, which are almost entirely paid for by counties and other local governments). Lee said at a forum last year that he’d like to see the funding formula change to 45% from the state, 45% from local, and the rest from federal funding.
Barnes said with the county’s contribution to the district – “they're not that far off from that now, yeah, but that's not the way the state charter was set up.”
But both Republican and Democratic New Hanover County commissioners have said they wish the state would do more, noting, as Barnes did, that the county is currently going above and beyond its requirements. And, complicating the matter further, the legislature is looking into limiting the funds local governments can raise through property tax evaluation, which calls into question how local governments could raise additional funds for public schools.
As for the local budget, he said they currently have about a $2.5 million hole; however, he’s proposed a series of measures to drop that closer to half a million dollars that they would need from the county commission. The budget has meant serious belt-tightening: Barnes said district principals identified about $16 million in additional needs but he had to even whittle that down to around $1.2 million in requests.
Adding back preschool classrooms?
The New Hanover County Commission appears willing to fund the six additional preschool classrooms they reduced last budget cycle. Providing pre-K has been harder for the district since losing those county funds, and the loss of the $5 million Head Start federal grant.
Barnes said that NC pre-K or state funding covers only about 40% of the cost of running those rooms, which cost about $150,000 each and include staffing. The state funds also have age restrictions and can only be used for four-year-olds. The remainder of the district’s preschool funds comes from the county commission or other Title I federal money.
Barnes said this fall, he is attempting to get two preschool classrooms at Blair Elementary and two at Murrayville certified for NC Pre-K. He needs to do this because the state will only fund classrooms it has certified. The process takes about a year, so if Barnes can get the state to sign off, they’ll add about $365,000 back into the budget for the 2027-2028 school year.
One option for next year is to move those rooms to either Howe or Johnson, but then move them back after the NC Pre-K certification is completed. But he said he understands that location is important for parents, too.
“We may get to the place where we have to decide what is more important, the slot or the location, and we're going to that, but that's a part of a grander conversation. I do think that this is a compromise issue,” he said.
Long-term budget negotiations, $320.5 million school bond proposal
Barnes said he also wanted the public to know that, in the context of the enrollment conversation, the $320.5 proposed school bond, which could be on the ballot in November, is not necessarily about building new schools.
“[It’s] to replace buildings that are outdated, unsafe, inefficient and outmoded, [buildings] like Pine Valley, like Mary C. Williams. The first phase of New Hanover High is designed specifically to improve the safety for children. So I don't want people to conflate those two and say, ‘Oh, you don't need buildings because you have less kids,’” he said.
Barnes did acknowledge that the building of Trask Middle School would be new, but said ultimately, “that would help with overcrowding issues at Laney [High School].”
“I think that a conversation about redistricting happens after we have a bond where we can create schools that are more educationally sound for children and safer,” he said.
On the redistricting front, he also said that the state measures schools on their transportation efficiency score, where districts are rated on how closely students live to their schools, in terms of costs.
And, while funding remains tight for the district, Barnes said he’s not quite there on selling any current school buildings, but said it would be a long-term discussion with the public.
Barnes will present the final budget to the school board on April 28 during the agenda review; the board will vote on it at its May 5 meeting. They expected to send it to the New Hanover County Commission on May 8 for approval.
