A growing number of families sharing homes in Montgomery County could have contributed to wildly underestimated school enrollment this year, some county leaders said Monday.
Roughly 1,600 more students than expected showed up for class this September, in a school year where planners estimated enrollment would grow by only 50 or so students.
School board members and school system officials have said some of the growth can be attributed to difficult economic times: Some parents have pulled their kids out of costly private schools and fewer families have left the area because of a lagging housing market.
But leaders also said they might not be able to accurately count how many people and families are living under one roof.
“How do you know how many people are living in any one household?” Council President Mike Knapp said. Knapp, who also is head of the Metropolitan Council of Governments, said regional leaders have been trying to figure out how they can get accurate census figures for planning purposes “basically without scaring people” who worry giving real numbers would result in housing code violations.
“There are communities and families that are already here and having kids — we didn’t have a good way to capture this in the first place,” Knapp said.
Councilwoman Valerie Ervin, a former school board member, had publicly voiced similar concerns a year ago, but school planning officials said then that shared housing was not making enrollment harder to predict.
This year, they agreed it was a factor.
“That has been going on for a long time in areas like Wheaton, Silver Spring, Gaithersburg and it may be spreading further now,” Bruce Crispell, director of long-range planning for the Montgomery school system said.
Crispell said the trend goes beyond immigrant communities and often involves children whose parents have lost their jobs or had foreclosed houses elsewhere moving in with relatives.
“It is in areas where we have seen some enrollment growth, I do think that is happening,” Crispell said.
“We do keep track of kids when they enter and withdraw, but right now we don’t really know specifically where they come from.”
