Last February, when Newtown’s Board of Finance was looking for every spare dollar to strip out of the budget before passing its recommendations on to the Legislative Council, board member Michael Portnoy raised what he admitted was a “radical idea”: closing one of the seven local public schools. Mr Portnoy had calculated that there were enough classrooms in three of the town’s four elementary schools to accommodate all of Newtown’s elementary school students. The idea floated for a while, buoyed by plausibility. But eventually it sank under the weight of uncertainty about possible unanticipated costs associated with school closure, about the accuracy of existing enrollment projections, and about difficulties in redistricting the town’s elementary school population.

Now, a new set of school enrollment projections for Newtown has been presented to the Board of Education by a planning consultant, predicting that the K–12 student population in the district will shrink by 26 percent over the next ten years — one in four seats empty in a decade. It is a startling prediction, but a reasonable one according to the consultant, who looked at a range of local trends, including births, home sales and housing construction, and the local unemployment rate. The numbers are sobering: the birth rate over 11 years, down 48 percent; housing net gain over 10 years, down 98 percent; single family home sales over 10 years, down 67 percent. And these declines took place against a backdrop of increased private school enrollment over the past 10 years.

Newtown’s Board of Education, which has spent years straining to meet the school district’s growing needs, found it difficult to tack immediately toward a future of declining needs. The initial reaction of the school board’s new chair, William Hart, to the consultant’s report was liberally laced with skepticism: “We have to make sure we take it with the appropriate grain of salt.”

We would share that skepticism if the state and nation were on the cusp of a robust economic recovery, but by all credible accounts, the economy’s growth will, at best, be weak in the near term. Jobs will continue to be scarce, and the optimism that influences birth rates and home purchases is nowhere to be found. So we hope that salted skepticism does not end up tasting like complete denial.

Mr Portnoy’s idea only seemed radical because it came as a surprise and was not supported by the kind of study and deliberation that should accompany decisions fraught with consequences — like the closure of a school. If these latest enrollment projections are correct, however, Newtown’s student population will start to drain away from the bottom in its kindergartens and elementary grades within the next few years.

Now is the time to start a review of options on how best to serve a smaller student population without wasting tax dollars. We need to ask ourselves at this point which would be worse — being wrong on a school enrollment projection, or being totally unprepared for significant changes coming our way?