Washington-area classrooms are experiencing an unprecedented increase in low-income students, causing strain not only on academic performance, but also on already burdened school budgets.
In Montgomery County, nearly 30 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced price lunches — a school system’s measure of family wealth.
That’s up from 27 percent in 2008-09, and barely 4 percent in the early 1970s, according to district data.
“Younger households have moved in,” said Bruce Crispell, demographer for Montgomery schools. “And for years we’ve drawn more immigrant families to the county,” he said, indicating that immigrant groups have much higher poverty rates than the general population.
In Fairfax County, the 5,000-student growth in eligibility for free or reduced price lunches outpaced total enrollment growth by more than 3,000 students.
“It’s happening all over the county,” said Fairfax School Board President Kathy Smith. “Even in wealthier areas with very low percentages, sometimes that percentage is doubling … it’s happening to families you wouldn’t necessarily expect.”
Alexandria schools have seen some of the highest rates of enrollment growth in the region — more than 10 percent since fiscal 2006 to nearly 12,000 students.
At the same time, low-income students have risen to 55 percent of the population, up from 49 percent.
As elsewhere, the growth has come as immigrants and younger, more economically vulnerable families have moved in.
And while those children may have just as much potential, and may act just as sweet, schools spend more per student on low-income kids, adding millions of dollars to budgets in the form of extra teachers to ensure smaller class sizes and more resources for everything from English-language instruction to full-day kindergarten.
In Fairfax, the school board approved an additional $5.4 million and 73 teaching positions in its final fiscal 2011 budget to account for the “significant increase” in low-income students. That came even as the overall budget cut 200 positions and added hefty student fees.
As elsewhere in the region, Fairfax uses a staffing formula that allocates additional resources to schools with higher numbers of students from low-income families, accounting for the uptick in dollars.
In Montgomery, much of the low-income growth is happening in less wealthy areas such as Silver Spring and Germantown, home to Superintendent Jerry Weast’s “red zone” initiative. In those areas, students learn in smaller class sizes and with more academic support.
Results in the youngest grades, especially, have been remarkable, but the cost to sustain the two-tiered district continues to climb.
“Parents and educators in schools that don’t have the large free-lunch populations sometimes come back with, ‘But we have issues, too,’ and they do,” said Montgomery school board member Mike Durso. “There’s no question schools with large pockets of poverty need to be able to regroup, but it’s tough with all of the other financial strains right now.”
Stephen Fuller, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University, said that school systems’ current financial burdens are partly because of a demographic cycle that likely will take several generations to become wealthy again.
A full half of the region’s population growth since 1990 has been because of foreign-born immigrants — not only from Latin America, but Asia, Africa and all over the world, Fuller said. They have tended to be poorer, and with more children. In addition, he said, suburbs have seen more young families, who moved while financially sound but have been harder hit by recent unemployment.
“Most people haven’t been coming here because we’ve had great social services, but because we’ve had opportunities,” Fuller said. “You can’t blame it on anybody, but it is, for now, an extra burden.”
