Since 2018, Flagler County has seen an increase of 2,359 school-age children. Hardly any have enrolled in public schools.
Private school enrollment since 2018 has increased 139 percent, state figures show.
Homeschool enrollment has increased 86 percent.
Flagler school enrollment increased 2.5 percent. That gain was wiped out in the last two years, as more students are leaving the district.
Based on the same figures, the district is projecting a further 14 percent decline in the district’s enrollment by 2035, to just 10,434 students.
Most of its nine traditional public schools, with the notable exceptions of Flagler Palm Coast High School and Buddy Taylor Middle School, are under capacity and getting emptier. Rymfire Elementary is at 70 percent capacity. Wadsworth Elementary is at 82 percent capacity. Fewer elementary school students are enrolling–not just in Flagler County, but across the country, as fertility rates have been falling since 2007.
Now, for the first time since 2021, the Flagler County school district is acknowledging to local governments that it is no longer planning to build a new middle school and a new high school, as it had been planning to do by decade’s end.
“Right now we do not have a recommendation to build,” Lisa Divina, the district’s school planner, told an annual gathering of elected officials from the county and its cities Thursday in Bunnell. She even mentioned a word dreaded in public school circles: “consolidation,” though she didn’t do so in connection with local schools. “It’s happening across Florida, and most of the consolidations and closings that you are hearing about,” she said, have to do wither with aged schools or “some are the enrollment are not coming in as expected before, and so some are consolidating and some are closing.”
Flagler schools are not there yet. But a new “decision threshold” has replaced plans for the two new schools. The “decision threshold” is a complicated checklist of new realities that the district would have to overcome before it considers building a new school.
It is a stark admission that contrary to its projections in 2021, when it was forecasting an increase of almost 2,500 students by decade’s end, the district’s enrollment is shrinking, after remaining flat since the housing crash of 2007 even though Flagler County’s population has increased 35 percent since then. Divina showed on overhead screens a startling graph illustrating the projected enrollment decline.
Yet the district’s student projections were not wrong. If anything, they were an undercount. A 2021 district study forecast an increase of 2,328 students by 2030. Based on figures reported to the state, student counts in Flagler County as a whole did in fact grow 2,359 between 2018 and this year, and is projected to overshoot the 2030 projection perhaps by 1,000 students. But almost all those students are going to private schools and homeschooling.
“Maybe this requires a change in how we report the student projections,” said Andy Dance, the county commissioner who chairs the intergovernmental committee that met Thursday to review school enrollment figures and construction projections. “We really need to break those overall projections down, in my opinion, into where they’re actually going, because it gives us a false idea of those going into seats in our schools, and really that’s the complex part of our reporting now, is in microschools and different designations of where students are going. I see a drastic change in six years from the reports that this is still the same report that we’re looking at from six years ago. Things have changed drastically.” Dance was previously a Flagler County School Board member.
Microschools, or learning pods, are a new form of schooling that enrolls a small number of students–it can be as few as five or a dozen–often at different grade levels. The district is considering running a microschool or two.
The state-reported figures also put the lie to the claim that the erosion of public school students began only with the expansion of the school voucher program, which since 2023 has made available $8,000 per student to families wishing to homeschool or pay for private school. The erosion began long before that. But it has accelerated with the advent of universal vouchers. In Flagler County, 1,926 students are receiving vouchers this year, according to state and local figures.
Will Furry, the Flagler County School Board member and one of three members who participated in Thursday’s meeting–Janie Ruddy and Lauren Ramirez also participated–was likely misinterpreting the numbers when he claimed that “there’s going to be a point here where we see some things level off with vouchers.”
He repeated a frequent, misleading rationalization of vouchers’ effects on schools: “Some of those students never actually enrolled in Flagler schools, they went straight to those vouchers, and so that is not a true reflection of a say, hey, 1,900 students left Flagler schools,” he said. He’s right in so far as the students may have never left Flagler schools. But because of vouchers, many of those students never enrolled in Flagler schools to start with, and were in essence diverted to other options.
There is no evidence that those diversions are about to “level off.”
“I think that what we’re trying to do is assume that student enrollment is linear, as it was in the past, directly correlated with population density,” Ruddy said. “But this is the new normal. And where we’re struggling with Flagler County is we’re on the cusp of our enrollment capacities. But if you look at just the study that was completed for us two years ago, we’re already, as a county, off. The numbers that were projected were lower, because there are lower birth rates, there are lower numbers due to immigration policies, and for our county specifically, the new developments have not brought in younger families. So what’s happening is we’re looking for a definitive answer of should we build a school based upon what’s happening in the future and what traditionally we could count on—we can’t necessarily do that right now.”
It is not just about whether the district will build new schools or not. The district is acknowledging that it won’t build any for now. But the unspoken acknowledgement is that the amount of development impact fees it is collecting to defray the cost of new construction is not as critical as the district claimed it was in 2021, when it pushed for a doubling of the impact fees, and got an increase of about a third.
In the 10 months to March 2026 alone, the district collected $5.1 million in development impact fees, $4.5 million of that from Palm Coast. How much has the district collected in total since 2021? You won’t find that figure disclosed in any publicly available documents that clearly indicate the source of the money as impact fees, including on the district’s so-called “transparency” dashboard. But the current budget was estimating that the district would have a capital fund reserve of $81.6 million this month.
Impact fees are one-time levies on new home construction that builders must pay once the house is completed.
In 2021, the Flagler Home Builders Association and some county commissioners objected to the size of the school district’s impact fee increase, arguing that the evidence was not there to justify it. The evidence was there, as enrollment figures now show. It just wasn’t interpreted correctly in light of the rapidly changing trends of homeschooling and vouchers. That doesn’t lessen the home builders’ argument that the changing trends are not reflected in the district’s continued collection of impact fees, currently at $3,600 per house.
The so-called “Oversight Committee on the Interlocal Agreement on Public School Facility Planning,” as the joint government committee overseeing the impact fee system is called, with impenetrable clunkiness, was set up as a result of the controversy that emerged out of the district’s 2021 impact fee increase. The committee was to enable the district to increase those fees in $500 increments for every increase of 500 students.
That has never been necessary. The committee has kept meeting once a year (a working committee at staff levels meets more frequently). But if Thursday’s meeting formalized a sharp retreat from previous school-construction plans, it also made new projections based on housing development plans that point to some needed school construction in the distant future.
Those projections are based on several large developments that have either recently been approved or may soon be approved. They include:
- Bunnell’s Reserve at Haw Creek, a 6,100-home development projected to generate 1,131 new students, with nearly 2,000 new students expected from Bunnell developments.
- Flagler Beach’s Veranda Bay and Summertown developments, expected to add 435 students.
- Palm Coast’s so-called “western expansion,” a planned 22,000-home development west of U.S. 1 that would add 4,383 students by build-out in 2056, for a total of 5,760 new students from the combined developments in Palm Coast’s pipeline. (Palm Coast was represented by Council member Charles Gambaro and Flagler Beach by Commissioner James Sherman, but both cities failed to send their staff representatives to the meeting, which drew an extended plaint from Dance: “I am disappointed. I think the largest growth sector is not here today,” he said. “It’s disappointing that we didn’t have the opportunity to have a deeper discussion with staff, and I don’t know that there’s anything we can do about it.”)
But again: the student projections are based on the old model of assuming that most of those students will enroll in public schools, which is no longer the case. The projections are also based on optimistic assumptions that all three major developments and the more than two dozen other smaller developments will all go forward as planned, as if recessions, demographic trends and immigration crackdowns don’t exist, which does not align with current realities (Flagler County this year experienced its first decline in property values in 14 years).
Officials around the table on Thursday acknowledged that projections are not necessarily what they seem.
I understand the state is still mandating that we show all students in new developments as if they’re coming to the school district,” Dance said. “The impact fees are based on that. But we know now there’s a different distribution based on choice on where they’re going, and so when we see the developments that are coming online, I think we’re falsely seeing that that’s all impacting the school district.”
He added, by way of a conclusion that others echoed: “I just am glad that this is still an integral part in our intergovernmental coordination. It’s important that we assist the school district as much as we can, and that we get together to see the impacts of growth on the community.”
See a slide presentation of the meeting’s figures here, and the full annual report of school planning and concurrency below.
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