St. Vrain expects to grow by over 2,000 students in next 5 years

The St. Vrain Valley School District is expecting to see more growth in the next five years, especially on the eastern side of the district.

District Planning Director Scott Toillion presented enrollment projections for the 2022-2026 school years at Wednesday’s school board meeting.

According to Toillion, the district saw stronger growth in 2021 than it anticipated. St. Vrain added 886 students this school year, which helped make up for the 1,106 students who departed the district in 2020.

Toillion doesn’t expect quite the same increase in student enrollment over the next few years, though numbers will continue to go up. He projects that the district, which currently has 31,516 students enrolled, will see 2,436 more students through 2026.

“It’s a pretty moderate growth rate,” Toillion said. “It does copy, in a way, mirror what the state demographer is saying.”

His mid-level predictions expect 290 more students for the 2022 school year, nearing and surpassing 500 annually in the next four years after that. He said his predictions over previous years have been off by just 26 students on average, and nearly exact in several years.

Toillion emphasized that Weld County is expected to be one of the fastest growing counties in Colorado in the coming years, meaning the eastern side of the St. Vrain school district will be seeing quite a bit of growth.

Student growth projections for the Niwot, Longmont, Silver Creek, Skyline and Lyons areas are expected to see student populations remain pretty similar to current levels over the next five years. Frederick and Mead are expected to see some steady growth, while Erie is projected to continue a much faster population increase.

“A lot of the growth is going to be happening in our eastern part of the district,” Toillion said.

While a number of factors — from the pandemic to the worker and housing shortage to lower birth rates — could impact population, Toillion said it seems pretty certain that both Boulder and Weld counties will continue to grow in the coming years.

Notably, St. Vrain saw births within the district defy state trends. In Colorado overall, births went down in 2020 and 2021, but in St. Vrain, 2021 saw the largest number of births in the past 10 years. Those infants will be entering the school system in 2026.

Toillion also pointed to housing development in the St. Vrain district boundaries, with Longmont issuing for 2022 the largest number of permits for new housing since 2008. He did add that many of those have been for multi-family units, which tend to bring smaller student yields.

In Weld County, many more of those building permits are for single family units with higher student yields. Toillion mapped out where the largest planned developments are in the St. Vrain boundaries, and almost all of them are on the eastern side of the district.

He said next steps will be to look at the timing of future facility needs, especially in the Erie area.

“There are some areas in the next five years that will start to require attention, and Erie is one of them,” Toillion said.

He added that while growth has slowed on the other side of the district, he doesn’t believe there’s any need to look at school closures currently.

“I don’t think anything is in that kind of condition where we would start looking at consolidating or combining,” Toillion said.

Compared to other Front Range districts, Toillion said St. Vrain is in a different position because of the increasing growth in Weld. While other districts are starting to see things slow, the growth along the I-25 corridor is not showing signs of stopping.

“We’re more favorable as far as growth goes because of the eastern part of our district,” Toillion said.

Editor's note: This article has been updated to correct where the district expects to see growth, which is on the eastern side.