Richmond Public Schools enrollment data are undermining claims from members of Richmond City Council that surging enrollment would require a future George Wythe High School to be built to accommodate 2,000 students to prevent overcrowding when it opens.

The council’s claims of growing enrollment have become a key justification for members of the governing body to block the transfer of $7.3 million to RPS to begin design of a replacement for the decrepit George Wythe building. The Richmond School Board insists a new George Wythe only needs to have 1,600 seats.

That dispute over the school’s size was in clear view Tuesday night when the City Council and School Board met, but left with nothing settled. City Council is poised to vote on the funding transfer at its next meeting Monday, March 28.

Seeking to break the impasse, 6th District Councilwoman Ellen F. Robertson urged the School Board to consider a compromise of building a school for 1,800 students, with room for expansion if needed. Members of the School Board did not immediately embrace the idea.

One problem for advocates of the larger school: Evidence of a surge in enrollment is not showing up in the data.

In the past 10 years, even as the city’s population grew 11 percent, RPS reports show public school enrollment fell by the equivalent of at least three elementary schools.

Since 2010, RPS’ reported enrollment has dropped from 23,454 students in pre-kindergarten to 12th grade to 21,179 students enrolled in September, a decline of nearly 2,300 stu- dents, or 9.7 percent.

The decline has been felt largely at the secondary level, with thousands of empty seats in middle and high schools. Even on South Side, where there has been growth in enrollment, the growth has been modest.

Ninth District Councilman Michael J. Jones has said that student enrollment growth in South Side is surging, noting that the new River City Middle School on Hull Street Road, which was built with a capacity for 1,583 students, is almost full.

“It does not make sense to build a feeder high school at the same capacity as the middle school,” he has said, adding his frustration that the School Board does not support a new 2,000-student high school.

However, while the enrollment data show River City Middle with a September enrollment of 1,515 students, the data also shows that the two other South Side middle schools, Lucille Brown and Thomas Boushall, are well below capacity.

Brown started the year with 584 students, according to RPS, or 195 fewer students than the 779 students the building was designed to accommodate.

Boushall started the year with 455 students, or 430 fewer students than the 885 students the building can accommodate, according to RPS.

Except for River City Middle, no other middle school in the city is at capacity.

That imbalance in student populations is the reason that an RPS committee currently is working on a plan to alter attendance zones to reduce the student population at River City Middle and increase it at other middle schools.

When enrollment at the three middle schools is combined, the data show that enrollment has barely budged at the three feeder schools for the two South Side high schools, George Wythe and Huguenot.

In September, the three middle schools enrolled a combined 2,554 students, according to RPS’ report to the state Department of Education. That is up 166 students from the pre-pandemic 2018-19 school year when 2,388 students were enrolled in the three schools.

In 2018-19, the three South Side schools were Brown, Boushall and Elkhardt-Thompson Middle School, which River City replaced.

The combined enrollment of the three middle schools still falls short of the total number of students that George Wythe and Huguenot can accommodate.

The current Wythe can accommodate 1,401 students, while Huguenot has a capacity for 1,426 students, according to RPS. That’s a combined total of 2,827 high school student, or 273 more students than are enrolled now in the three middle schools.

If a new George Wythe were built for 1,600 students, there would be 473 extra seats compared with the current combined middle school enrollment.

And empty middle school seats are already a reality across the city.

Enrollment data show RPS has more than 2,200 empty seats in its seven middle schools, or one-third of their total capacity.

This year, RPS reported enrolling 4,360 middle school students in the seven buildings, far short of the 6,503 students that the school system reported the buildings can accommodate.

School Board member Jonathan M. Young, 4th District, said the lack of student population growth in the middle school numbers is reflected in the high schools, which also reported about 2,500 vacant seats across the city.

In September, RPS reported 5,479 students were enrolled in the eight high schools that have capacity for 8,074 students, or 30 percent fewer students than the buildings can accommodate.

He said the data showing excess space in the public secondary schools has prompted him to advocate closing at least one existing middle school and one existing high school, though he acknowledged he has garnered little support from his eight colleagues for shutting down two schools.

However, he noted that the data reflect a Richmond reality that a substantial chunk of school-age children in the city are not enrolled in RPS. He said figures indicate that for every 100 babies born each year in Richmond, only 70 eventually will be enrolled in the public schools.

“That statistic has not changed,” he said. From private schools to home schools to relocating to the county, a significant number of parents choose alternatives to the city’s public schools.

He said this kind of data, plus projections from a demographic consultant of little to no growth in secondary enrollment for the next 10 years, has led the School Board to conclude that building a new George Wythe to accommodate 1,600 students would be sufficient while building for 2,000 students would add to the current overcapacity.

“What we are being asked to do is spend millions of extra dollars to build a school that is far larger than is likely to be needed,” Mr. Young said. “And the council members are not even counting the separate 1,000-student career and technical education high school that also is being planned for South Side.”

He said he and four other members of the board see no way to justify building an oversized George Wythe that would sop up money needed to pay for another needed school project, a replacement for Woodville Elementary School in the East End.

Richmond Free Press reporter Ronald E. Carrington contributed to this story.