Stabilize Enrollment

Fewer students means lower staffing levels and lower utilization rates of school facilities and other forms of diminished operational efficiencies. As a result, declines in enrollment necessitate reductions in electives and other educational programming, such as the decision to consolidate the high school theater programs. If not reversed, reduced enrollment could eventually force a school closure, which would lower the values of surrounding homes and undermine community cohesion and identity within the affected neighborhoods. Therefore, the district has a responsibility to do everything it can to stabilize enrollment.

On many occasions, the district has publicly attributed this decline to the broader population trend of a declining domestic birthrate. While that is one factor, the fact is that the number of TSD resident students (i.e., school-age children who reside within the boundaries of the Troy School District) in Fall 2025 was 67 FTE lower than it was in Fall 2016. So how is overall district enrollment declining so much more than the decrease in TSD resident students? There are in fact three primary drivers of the enrollment declines that Troy has experienced since over the past decade:

1. Decline in the number of TSD resident students
2. Decline of the District’s number of enrolled students who reside outside of Troy
3. Decline of the District’s market share of TSD resident students

While reversing the decline of TSD resident students may be outside the District’s direct sphere of control, different policy choices by the board over the past 10 years could have mitigated the decline in FTE. That is, address the decrease in the number of non-resident students who enroll in the District. Specifically, each year the Board approves a set number of seats to open up to out-of-district students and can choose which grades to offer these seats and can choose whether to make them accessible to other Oakland County students or students from an adjacent county.

Figure 1: FTE Non-TSD Resident Students Enrolled and the Amount of Lost Per Pupil Funding Since 2019-20

Source: MISchoolData.org

Therefore, the 429 decrease in out-of-district FTE students that the district experienced between 2016-17 and 2025-26 was the direct result of the Board voting to admit fewer out-of-district students. Had the district maintained out-of-district enrollment at 2016-17 levels over the past decade, it would have received about $13.0 million in additional per pupil funding from the state, including an additional $4.6 million in 2025-26 alone (about 2.3% of the 2025-26 general fund operating budget). Therefore, about 51% of the enrollment declines over the past decade can be directly attributed to the Board’s series of votes to limit out-of-district enrollment.

In addition to fewer out-of-district students enrolling in the Troy School District (TSD), fewer TSD resident students are choosing to enroll in the District as well. If you combine the Student Count and Nonresident Enrollment data files with data from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS S1401), it is possible to construct a measure of the percentage of TSD resident students who attend TSD (i.e., “TSD market share”).

Figure 2: TSD Market Share and Number of TSD Resident Students (FTE) Over Time

Source: MISchoolData.org and Data.Census.Gov

As Figure 2 shows, the TSD FTE market share has been in steady decline over the past decade, dropping from a high of 90.4% in 2016-17 to 88.4% a decade later. If TSD had maintained an 90.4% market share, then it would have recruited over 252 more TSD resident students in 2025-26, which would have partially offset the loss of 434 out-of-district students. Given that each student brought in $10,701 in per pupil foundation allowance in 2025-26, the decrease of 252 TSD resident students represents lost revenue of $2.7 million.

To summarize, between 2016-17 and 2025-26, the FTE decline in TSD enrollment from 12,782 to 12,040 (-742) was the combination of three factors:

1. A decline in the number of TSD resident students by 67 (9% of the total FTE loss)
2. A choice by the Board to reduce the number of out-of-district students by 434 students (58% of the total FTE loss)
3. A decline in the District’s FTE TSD resident market share from 90.4% to 88.4%, which works out to about 252 fewer students (34% of the total FTE loss)

In other words, only a small portion of the enrollment decline is due to population loss. Instead, the decline in enrollment is a direct result of Board policy and a decline in TSD resident market share over the past decade. Fortunately, both of those trends are fixable.