After years of declining enrollment, Cambridge public schools are taking action to identify the phenomenon’s often-debated causes and stop the shrinkage of the student population.

In mid-February, the Cambridge Public School (CPS) Committee decided to conduct a market research study over the next two to three months which will identify what Cantabrigians think caused the enrollment decrease so that the school system can effectively combat the problem.

In the 1995-1996 school year, the school system boasted a total enrollment of 7,988. By the 2002-2003 school year, enrollment had fallen to 6,994, according to the Department of Cambridge Community Development website. CPS Committee member Patricia M. Nolan ’80 said those numbers have sunk to 6,000 for the current school year.

While CPS officials say the numbers signal a trend, they have not been able to definitively identify the causes of the enrollment drop.

Some CPS officials cite the increasing cost of living in Cambridge as the primary reason for the decline.

“I think the main cause from all the information that we’ve seen has been the rising cost of housing in Cambridge,” CPS Information Office Director Justin T. Martin said.

But some committee members said they disagreed with the economic explanation because nearby communities with equally high costs of living have not had the same decline in school enrollment.

“We are losing students while other communities that have just as high housing costs as we have are gaining [students],” Nolan said, referring to the increase in school enrollment reported by Lexington and Wellesley. The two towns boast median house values of $417,400 and $548,100, respectively, in contrast to Cambridge’s median house value of $398,500, according to City-Data.com for the year 2000.

The academic performance of the school system, rather than economics, may be to blame, Nolan said.

“Half or more of our decline is

because our school system isn’t equipped to deliver the high quality education that parents deserve, given our spending,” she said.

In the 2004 fiscal year, CPS spent an average of $13,363 per student on regular education, which is the eighth highest spending per student in the state of Massachusetts. Nationally, public schools spend an average of $8,208 per pupil, according to the National Education Association’s Fall 2004 Report of School Statistics Update.

But Martin said that extensive surveys conducted with students who have left the system suggest the decrease in enrollment numbers are not a result of concerns about the quality of academics in the school system.

“I think that all the research that we have seen has shown that there has been very little to no correlation between the two,” Martin said.

Dr. Joseph Petner, principal of the Haggerty School—which has actually seen an increase in its enrollment for the last year—noted that pinpointing the cause of declining enrollment is more difficult than picking and choosing amongst theories.

“I think there are many contributing factors around enrollment decline, some of which are around the federal and state policies related to public education and others are related to the economics and the changing demographics of the city,” Petner said.

CPS committee member Alfred Fantini expressed positive sentiments about the school system and noted that the market research study will arm the committee with the necessary tools it needs to reverse the current enrollment trend.

“All in all, we’re holding our share, we’re doing better than most communities, we want to do fact finding and we’re finally going to do it,” Fantini said. “I’m looking forward to seeing what the results are.”

—Staff writer Laura A. Moore can be reached at lamoore@fas.harvard.edu.