Olympia School District enrollment set to decline, forecast shows. Here’s why
The Olympia School District’s enrollment is projected to decline by 1,000 students in the next 10 years, a trend many schools have been following since the COVID-19 pandemic.
A team hired by the school district said it can blame a decline in the local birthrate, an aging population and an increase in multifamily housing for the lack of kindergarteners entering Olympia schools.
An enrollment forecast is a required part of the district’s long-range facilities master plan, said Executive Director of Business and Finance Kate Davis during an Oct. 23 meeting.
She said the district had a forecast done by Flow Analytics a couple of years ago, but they wanted to dig deeper and see what other companies were available. The district is now working with Berk Consulting out of Seattle.
Kevin Gifford, associate principal at Berk Consulting, walked the school board through the long-term enrollment forecast that covers the next 10 years in the district.
He said Berk prepared forecasts of student enrollment for the 2025-2026 school year through 2033-2034, including detailed projections for individual school and grade level.
Gifford said the main factors they look at for projecting enrollment are population growth in the district, including people with children moving in and local birth rates, and how many of those children go into kindergarten. After that, they look at cohort progression, or how every grade level moves through the system.
“So there’s effectively two questions that you ask here: how many new kindergarten students are you getting every year and then how are the existing students moving through the system?” he said.
Gifford said annual average headcounts are also a factor, as well as historic enrollment. He said data is collected from the Office of Financial Management, the U.S. Census Bureau and the Thurston Regional Planning Council. Birth data from the Department of Health has also been incorporated in their findings.
He said ultimately, they’re trying to get a sense of what the projected births for families living in the district are, which then flows into projected kindergarten enrollments going forward.
Gifford said as with most school districts, there was strong growth up until the COVID-19 pandemic. Many school districts are still feeling the pandemic’s lingering effects. He said in Olympia, enrollment rose in the 2024-2025 school year. However, numbers are still below pre-pandemic enrollment levels.
In the 2015-2016 school year there were 9,713 students, according to Berk’s report. In the 2020-2021 school year, that number dropped to 9,548 students. Enrollment in the 2024-2025 school year was 9,555 students.
Gifford said experts are still trying to figure out exactly what the new normal is post-pandemic.
He said the city’s population has been steadily growing since 2010, but at a slightly lower rate than Thurston County overall. And his team noticed a large shift from single-family homes to multifamily residential developments. He said they typically see fewer students coming out of multifamily households compared to single-family homes.
Gifford said they see that as potentially contributing to a long-term decline in enrollment in Olympia schools.
According to Berk’s report, from the years 2000 to 2004 there were 293 single-family homes permitted and 61 multifamily homes. From the years 2020 to 2024, those numbers have switched; there were 63 single-family homes permitted and 354 multifamily homes.
Gifford said another factor that’s contributing to a decline in enrollment is Olympia’s aging population. He said the district population has shifted to be slightly older. And the population of children under the age of 5 has fallen drastically since 2020. Meanwhile, he said the population of females of the age to have children, which their report says is from 15 to 44 years old, continues to grow.
According to their report, in 2025 there were 15,443 females between the ages of 15 and 44, and 520 district births. Gifford’s team projected that in 2030, there will be 16,158 females between the ages of 15 and 44, and 459 district births.
He said that combination means a decline in the local birth rate.
Gifford said this is evident in the number of students entering kindergarten. He said before the pandemic, the district was getting more kindergarten students every year than the number of babies that had been born in the district five years prior. After the pandemic, that switched. Now the district is getting fewer students than were born five years ago.
He said the pandemic was still a pretty recent event, and there’s still time for things to change. But from what his team has seen from the last few years, he said the decline seems to be the new trend, and it may take a while to bring numbers back up.
“And there could also be other factors at play, such as people continuing to homeschool or going to private schools or other non-district educational solutions rather than enrolling their children in kindergarten,” Gifford said.
He said his team anticipates a decrease in enrollment of at least 1,000 students below current numbers over the next 10 years.
Gifford said in the short term, middle and high school enrollment will be less immediately affected compared to elementary grades.
Housing as a factor
Gifford said Berk was able to project the number of students the district is likely to get out of any future housing development that’s proposed in Olympia.
He said they took a look at housing development patterns in the district over the previous five years as well as anonymized student addresses to identify housing types, when that house was constructed and more.
He said from 2020 to 2024, the district had 1,429 new housing units go online. Of those, 1,088 were multifamily housing. However, there were 171 students living in those single-family homes compared to 139 students in multifamily housing.
“Basically, your single-family homes are generally going to produce quite a few more students than multifamily units will, and therefore, that way you can assess the impact fees for different housing types based on this,” he said.
Gifford said more than double the number of students live in larger single-family homes compared to smaller, 3-bedroom or fewer homes. And that number is twice that of those who live in multifamily housing.
Board President Scott Clifthorne asked Gifford for advice on how to relay this information to the community, and how to help bring enrollment back to pre-pandemic numbers.
Gifford said that Olympia schools are not alone in this trend. He said the aging population and declining birth rates are happening across Thurston County and the nation as a whole.
“You’re not dealing with it alone,” he said. “I realize that may not make it any better, it may not make the decisions any easier, but I’m hoping that being informed about them will ease that a little bit.”
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