“You’ve learned that every good lie is threaded with truth and every accepted truth leaks lies.”
― Dennis Lehane

Capacity, Crawly Things, and 1,481 Missing Students

As I’ve mentioned before, the fourth quarter is an extremely busy time for me. Busy to the point that it leaves very little room to dig around, to linger, to ask pointed questions. Most days it’s reaction layered on top of reaction, with precious little space for proactivity.

That’s not a complaint. It’s just a reality.

But once Christmas hits, time slows. The calendar opens up. The noise recedes a bit. And I regain something that’s easy to lose during the fall grind: capacity.

Capacity to look under rocks.
Capacity to ask questions.
Capacity to pay attention to the crawly things hiding underneath.

This year, with that capacity restored, I spent some time poking around the data provided by Metro Nashville Public Schools via its public data warehouse. MNPS updates enrollment data quarterly, and I went in with a fairly benign curiosity—mostly looking for patterns of school growth.

Large metropolitan districts often start the year with lower enrollment and then see modest growth once the weather turns cold and families experiencing housing instability move indoors. Those fluctuations are uncomfortable, but familiar. They show up every year. They’re often cited as “seasonal.”

What I found was not that.

What I found was the opposite of what I expected.

A Signal, Not Noise

A quick glance showed something troubling: many schools had lost students between August and October.

So I stopped glancing and started digging.

Between August 12 and October 1, Metro Nashville Public Schools lost 1,481 students.

Just shy of 1,500 kids disappeared from Nashville’s zoned schools in six weeks.

That’s not seasonal noise.
That’s a structural signal.

And the distribution of that loss matters.

A few things jumped out immediately:

• High schools alone account for over half the total loss (–835 students)

• Middle schools are bleeding quietly (–466 students)

• Elementary declines are smaller, but persistent (–281 students)

• Growth is limited almost entirely to adult, alternative, and charter-coded categories

The district likes to talk about declining birth rates as the primary driver of enrollment loss. Birth rates do matter—but this isn’t a birth-rate story.

Birth rates don’t explain 1,500 students leaving after the school year has already begun.

This is not demographic drift.
This is not census lag.
This is families making decisions.

Over six weeks, 1,481 students exited the MNPS pipeline.

Where the Loss Is Concentrated

The schools losing the most students are not fringe campuses or experimental programs. They are the district’s cornerstone comprehensive schools:

• Antioch High School (–131)

• McGavock High School (–108)

• John Overton High School (–103)

• Cane Ridge High School (–98)

• Antioch Middle School (–67)

• Glencliff High School (–62)

• Whites Creek High School (–52)

• Hunters Lane High School (–52)

• James Lawson High School (–52)

Geography matters here.

The losses are concentrated in Southeast Nashville, North Nashville, and legacy high-poverty clusters—areas the district frequently cites when talking about equity, access, and investment.

This isn’t random.
It isn’t evenly distributed.
And it isn’t happening everywhere.

Who Gained Students?

There were schools that gained enrollment.

The largest individual gains:

• Valor Collegiate (+53)

• East End Prep (+31)

• Nashville Classical (+26)

• Hume-Fogg (+24)

Here’s the part that doesn’t fit the usual talking points:

No zoned comprehensive high school gained more than a rounding error.

And overall?

Charter schools gained 56 students during the same six-week period in which MNPS lost nearly 1,500.

Let me say that again, because it matters.

Zoned schools lost 27 times more students than charter schools gained.

Charters are not absorbing the losses.
They are simply the visible winners.

The rest of those students didn’t shift laterally inside the system. They left it—or never showed up in October counts at all.

So when district leadership points to charter growth as the explanation for enrollment decline, the math quietly disagrees.

If MNPS talks about “stabilization” or “post-pandemic normalization,” this data does not support that narrative.

Six Weeks. Not Years.

Between August 12 and October 1, 2025, Metro Nashville Public Schools lost 1,481 students.

Not over a year.
Not since the pandemic.
Not across a decade.

In six weeks—after school was already in session.

That distinction matters, because early-year enrollment shifts are not driven by birth rates or housing trends. They are driven by family choices.

This isn’t a paper cut.

It’s a measurable hemorrhage with real-world consequences.

The Money Nobody Wants to Talk About

MNPS typically receives between $11,500 and $13,500 per student when you combine:

• State BEP funding

• Local operating dollars

• Federal pass-throughs (Title I, IDEA, etc.)

To stay cautious—and FOIA-defensible—I’ll use $12,000 per student as a midpoint. I know some will quibble. Let them.

1,481 students × $12,000 = –$17.8 million

A reasonable range looks like this:

• Low estimate: $16.3 million (at $11,000/student)

• High estimate: $20.0 million (at $13,500/student)

Bottom line: MNPS is staring at $16–20 million in lost annual operating revenue from a six-week enrollment shift.

That is not chump change.

And here’s the part that often gets lost:

The fiscal pain is felt by schools, not Central Office.

Using the same baseline numbers, high schools alone account for roughly $10 million of that loss.

The potential consequences are not theoretical:

• Course offerings shrink

• Class sizes creep upward

• “Under-enrolled” programs get cut

• Staff are excessed midyear or the following spring

What This Means for Teachers

Staffing ratios vary, but a safe planning assumption in MNPS is roughly:

1 teacher unit per 20–22 students

Using 1:21 as a midpoint:

1,481 students ÷ 21 ≈ 70 teacher units

Salary plus benefits (conservative):

~$75,000 per teacher unit

70 × $75,000 = $5.25 million in staffing pressure

And that’s before we even talk about:

• Counselors

• Librarians

• Instructional coaches

• Paraprofessionals

Meanwhile, charter and option schools gained 56 students.

56 × $12,000 = $672,000

That doesn’t cover:

• One large high school’s enrollment loss

• One staffing round at Antioch or McGavock

So when leadership talks about charter growth, the net financial picture remains deeply negative—yet charter schools dominate the conversation.

The High School Problem Nobody Wants to Name

The more data that comes in, the more apparent it becomes that Nashville has a high school problem.

The school board may not recognize it, but families clearly do.

And since “Every Child Known” is the district’s mantra, I’m sure Superintendent Dr. Adrienne Battle can tell you exactly where all those students went.

Maybe if a board member asked, the rest of us would know too.

Equity Meets Arithmetic

The board loves to talk about equity, so let’s start there.

This is where Every Child Known meets math.

Equity questions that deserve answers:

• Why are the largest enrollment losses concentrated in a small number of zoned high schools?

• What demographic patterns—income, disability, multilingual status—emerge when we analyze who is leaving these schools?

• How does the district justify equity commitments when the financial consequences of enrollment loss are not evenly distributed?

• Are any schools absorbing losses large enough to warrant stabilization funding? If not, why?

Accountability, Not Theater

Accountability gets plenty of airtime too.

So here are the accountability questions:

• At what enrollment decline threshold is senior leadership required to formally notify the board?

• What systems flag abnormal enrollment drops within the first 30 days of school?

• Who is responsible for acting on those signals—and how is that responsibility enforced?

On charter schools specifically:

• Why does district communication emphasize charter growth when net enrollment is down nearly 1,500 students?

• How much of the loss reflects students leaving MNPS entirely versus transferring within it?

• What is the plan to recover students who are no longer enrolled anywhere in MNPS?

• Does the current charter authorization strategy align with fiscal sustainability?

And finally, the strategy questions—the ones that separate oversight from theater:

• What specific interventions are being deployed at the highest-loss schools this year?

• How will MNPS prevent staffing reductions from accelerating further enrollment loss?

• What metrics will the board use to evaluate corrective actions by January?

• What is the plan if October-to-March enrollment continues to decline?

The one question that absolutely requires an answer:

If enrollment loss of this scale continues, which parts of the district’s operating model are no longer sustainable—and when will the board be told that plainly?

Do I expect public answers?

No.

Governance, Not Messaging

A loss of nearly 1,500 students in six weeks is not a communications issue.

It’s a governance issue.

The question for the school board is not whether MNPS can explain the numbers—it’s whether the board is willing to ask what those numbers say about the system families are choosing to leave.

Meanwhile, What Are We Talking About?

Over the holiday break, MNPS released information from its ongoing study of school start times.

After a month of focus groups, surveys, and virtual town halls—yes, I know, but they think you don’t—the district arrived at three proposed outcomes.

Model 1: Squeeze

High schools shift later by 20 minutes, elementary schools by 10 minutes, middle schools unchanged.

• High School: 7:25–2:25

• Elementary: 8:10–3:10

• Middle: 8:55–3:55

Model 2: Shift

All schools start 15 minutes later.

• High School: 7:20–2:20

• Elementary: 8:15–3:15

• Middle: 9:10–4:10

Model 3: No Change

• High School: 7:05–2:05

• Elementary: 8:00–3:00

• Middle: 8:55–3:55

After all of this, we are holding an expensive public conversation about 20 minutes or less.

Really?

At a time when the district is hemorrhaging students—especially at the high school level—leadership is asking families to weigh in on a marginal scheduling tweak.

Is this really where resources should be focused while facing a near $20 million loss?

And who is paying for this exercise?

Is it the Mayor’s office? Common opinion suggests Mayor O’Connell is driving this train to fulfill a campaign promise. In politics, optics often matter more than outcomes. Does a 20-minute shift count as a win?

I don’t know who’s footing the bill.

I do know there are places that need far more investment than this study—unless you believe 835 students left the district because they had to wake up 15 minutes earlier.

Down the Pike in the General Assembly

The Tennessee General Assembly convenes next week, and the comedy has already begun.

One bill I’m hearing about would eliminate Collaborative Conferencing altogether.

You’ll remember CC was created after lawmakers outlawed collective bargaining. It was framed as a compromise—a way to limit union power while offering teachers a voice.

Apparently, that wasn’t limiting enough.

To be clear: they’re not replacing CC. They’re just eliminating it.

Which is rich, because collaborative conferencing already forces educators to do enormous amounts of work to produce guidelines the district is under no obligation to follow.

Pressing issue, right?

If I were advising lawmakers, I’d say: skip the middleman and throw a fundraiser for the unions.

Under CC, all teachers were covered—members or not. The MOU created at least the appearance of a buffer between educators and district leadership. Whether that buffer was real is debatable, but appearances matter.

Remove CC, and the illusion of power disappears entirely.

Teachers will quickly realize that interpreting state law will come down to them versus the district—and they’ll need qualified help.

The unions will be standing there with membership forms.

I almost guarantee an uptick in membership.

More members means more dues.
More dues means more political influence.

Does anyone think these things through anymore?

Why This Exists

This isn’t corporate media.

There’s no team.
No budget.
No handlers.

It’s just me—trying to keep up, trying to keep you informed, and trying to say what others won’t.

If you value that work:

Venmo: @Thomas-Weber-10
Cash App: $PeterAveryWeber
Tips / Story Ideas: Norinrad10@yahoo.com

Until next time:

Accountability begins with accuracy—and with listening to the people closest to the work.

Categories: Education