By Shelby Stewart
Staff Writer
Brandon Twp.- At a special meeting on Monday night, the township hosted a workshop on their 2020 strategic planning, which examines the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to the community.
One of the issues that was brought up as a weakness is fewer children.
“We are still probably at fewer children,” said Dana DePalma, township trustee. “We don’t have much of a middle, and I think that becomes hard for starter homes, for starter families, people who are just having kids, and that’s where some of the lower school-age (children) is coming from.”
Fewer school-age children is not just a problem in Brandon, as according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the birthrate dropped 2 percent from 2017 to 2018, to 59 births per 1,000 women ages 15-44.

The birthrate has been dropping since the Great Recession of 2008, and it is currently the lowest it has been in 32 years nation-wide. Michigan’s birthrate is about the national average.
“We have 764 less school-aged children living within the Brandon school district boundaries when compared to 2009,” said Brandon Superintendent Dr. Matt Outlaw. “Birthrates are the lowest in 76 years in Michigan.”
In 2009, children within the Brandon School District were 3,260, and in 2019 it is down to 2,496.
“There are more options for school for families now than ever before in Michigan,” said Outlaw. “In 2009, few school districts were open to school of choice. Today, almost every district in Michigan is open to school-of-choice and they are aggressively recruiting out-of-district students. There are now 301 charter schools in Michigan, we have virtual schools and it is estimated that there are about 50,000 students in Michigan that are now home-schooled. This ultimately spreads the reduced student pool across more schools further exacerbating the challenge of having less children within the community.”
A big problem is the cost of having a child and starting a family. According to a recent survey of women ages 20-45 who said they had or expected to have fewer children than they thought was ideal, 64 percent said the cost of child care is too expensive, 49 percent said they were worried about the economy, 44 percent said they couldn’t afford more children, and 43 percent said they wanted to wait for more financial stability.
“That decline is coming because less people can afford to start their families in a starter home,” said DePalma. “People, when they come here, if they want property, they can’t afford the property as a starter. I think people want to come here because they want to have land, but the land is so expensive to build on. And then I think a lot of younger families are going back to the city.”
Outlaw echoed that the cost and lack of housing was leading to lack of school-age children.
“One of the biggest issues that I hear about is the lack of entry-level housing,” said Outlaw. “You have this in so many of the surrounding communities, but Brandon’s 2.2 (acre) standard makes a lot of housing too expensive as a starter. Thus, young families put their first roots down in other communities and move to bigger homes within that same community when the time comes.”