Eau Claire Area School District Seeking Input on Enrollment Decline

The Eau Claire Area School District is seeking input from community members on how to address their declining enrollment numbers.

The issue has become increasingly common across Wisconsin over recent years, often forcing districts to propose an operational referendum asking local property owners to pay more in taxes to maintain currently available services. Districts that fail to get those referendums approved by local voters are then forced to make significant cuts to their programming and staff or even close and consolidate their schools.

The Eau Claire Area School District considered a plan to consolidate a number of elementary schools last year. Under that proposal, Longfellow Elementary School would have been closed and either Roosevelt or Flynn Elementary School would have been absorbed by the Chippewa Valley Montessori School. The district ultimately decided against the consolidation after community members spoke out against the plan.

Still struggling with that declining enrollment a year later, however, district officials say they can't rule out giving further consideration to consolidations and closures or boundary changes to rebalance enrollment levels across its elementary schools. Eau Claire Area School District Superintendent Mike Johnson says they've seen an over eight percent decrease in overall enrollment over the last decade, and the district had over 1,600 vacant seats at the time of the consolidation proposal.

The district will host a public open house on their options at Eau Claire North on Tuesday, and a public survey is available on the district's website. That public survey will be reviewed in October before another public survey is released in November. District officials plan to present their findings from those surveys to the Demographic Trends and Facilities Planning Committee in January.