Location: Saint Paul, Minnesota
Website: Saint Paul Public Schools
Enrollment: 33,000+
Demographics: NCES Data
Saint Paul Public Schools (SPPS) serves a diverse community in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota. Across SPPS — the second-largest school district in the state — students speak more than 110 languages, nearly 80% of the student body identifies as people of color, and 30% of students are English-language learners.
But despite the district’s deep cultural ties to their community, SPPS faced a problem 10 years in the making: between the 2014–2015 and 2023–2024 school years, enrollment dropped by nearly 6,200 students — a 16% decrease.
Above: a chart demonstrating the 10-year enrollment trend at SPPS, representing the 2014–2015 to 2023–2024 school years.
It was a number the district predicted would grow only worse.
Like many urban districts nationwide, SPPS’s challenges stemmed from a combination of factors — primarily competition from other institutions:
Compounding these external pressures was a demographic shift: between 2018 and 2024, the city experienced a decline of 4,500 school-age children due to lower birth rates.
And COVID-19 only accelerated the enrollment decline. During the pandemic, SPPS’s focus was, understandably, on adapting to the immediate challenges of remote learning, changing health protocols, and complete upheavals in their daily operations.
Conversations about reversing declining enrollment had to take a backseat.
“We were in survival mode,” recalls Erica Wacker, Director of Communications at SPPS. “It wasn’t until after we were ‘back to normal’ that we could start to think proactively about turning the trend around.”
Before the pandemic, SPPS relied on traditional methods of community outreach to increase enrollment:
While these approaches helped raise general awareness, they often failed to differentiate individual schools and connect with families navigating St. Paul’s highly competitive educational landscape.
In such environments, schools that effectively promote themselves are the ones that capture families’ attention — but, as Wacker notes, “It’s not in a principal’s job description to think about increasing enrollment. They’re more focused on educating the students who show up, with limited time and resources to invest in getting more students to come.”
By 2022, under the leadership of then-Superintendent Dr. Joe Gothard — recipient of the 2024 AASA National Superintendent of the Year® award — SPPS recognized the urgency of addressing their declining enrollment trend.
Dr. Gothard’s visionary approach had already earned him national accolades. Now his leadership would be pivotal to what was next for SPPS.
Previously, Dr. Gothard had connected with SchoolMint through his role on the board of the Council of the Great City Schools. When the district shifted its focus to enrollment, SchoolMint became an early partner, conducting a comprehensive district enrollment assessment that covered, among many things, SPPS’s competitive landscape and enrollment processes.
Concurrently, SPPS embarked on a school consolidation process that, as Wacker explains, “involved closing some schools, merging some programs, and changing some pathways. This allowed us to envision some new programs that we weren’t currently offering.”
With SchoolMint’s enrollment audit and recommendations in hand, the school board established a special workgroup tasked with developing a targeted strategy to reverse the decline.
Their mandate was clear: SPPS needed to slow the enrollment losses and instead focus on intentionally increasing enrollment through bold action.
What followed was an ambitious campaign that would do more than just stop SPPS’s enrollment decline — it would have the district increase enrollment for the first time in 10 years.
Following the school board’s directive, SPPS launched The Enrollment Project, a data-driven initiative designed to turn under-enrolled schools with high growth potential into success stories.
The strategy was simple on paper yet ambitious in execution: identify schools with the physical capacity to grow and programs that aligned with what families in the community were seeking.
“We looked at what schools were under-enrolled and had the physical space to add more students,” explains Wacker. “We focused most on community schools and elementary schools. Then that list was further narrowed to ensure we were representing various areas of our city.”
This initiative would provide the chosen schools with financial and staff support from the district to amplify their unique strengths and attract new families.
The first step was selecting six schools for the campaign:
These schools were chosen based on not just their physical capacity to grow but also their geographic distribution across the city and willingness to actively participate in the initiative.
Administrators encouraged each school to embrace the project, but they knew that for the Enrollment Project to be successful, they needed to go beyond grassroots efforts.
To do that, they tapped SchoolMint for a second time.
By August 2023, the partnership between SPPS and SchoolMint transitioned from district-level research to school-level action.
Building on insights from SPPS’s 2022 enrollment marketing assessment, SchoolMint’s focus turned to equipping each school in the Enrollment Project with resources, customer service training, and marketing strategies needed to connect with families effectively.
This phase marked a critical turning point, bridging the gap between broad district goals and localized initiatives that would meet the unique needs of each school and their community.
First, SchoolMint conducted a “secret shopper” evaluation for five* of the six schools selected for the Enrollment Project. With this service, a SchoolMint enrollment consultant posed as a prospective parent, navigating each school’s enrollment process to assess its strengths and opportunities for improvement.
The findings led to recommendations around key areas of the family enrollment experience, including:
But SchoolMint’s support didn’t stop at identifying improvements; it also included school-level training that equipped the principals and other staff with the skills to deliver excellent customer service and improve family interactions.
Some of the key areas covered included:
By combining the 2022 district assessment insights with the 2023 secret shopper reports and targeted training sessions, SchoolMint empowered the participating schools to create more welcoming and effective enrollment processes.
These foundational changes set the stage for the next phase of the partnership: digital advertising for each school.
* Note: The six schools chosen for the Enrollment Project had autonomy on whether to work with SchoolMint. Five of the six schools chose to partner with SchoolMint.
With the strategy done, training sessions conducted, and schools focusing on in-person community outreach, SchoolMint moved onto the next critical element of the partnership: developing a custom advertising strategy for each partner school.
“Although there are hundreds of local marketing agencies, few specifically cater to K-12 schools. What’s appealing about SchoolMint is that they truly understand our challenges as public schools,” says Wacker.
A major challenge for SPPS has always been competition. With other schools actively marketing themselves, SPPS needed to level the playing field. Here, SchoolMint brought not only school marketing expertise but also a deep understanding of SPPS’s biggest competitor: charter schools.
“Our number one competition comes from charters. They’re doing things that we aren’t to get families to come there,” explains Wacker. “So we need to know what they’re doing, and whether we like it or not, we have to up our game if we want to stand out.”
This understanding underscored the need to be proactive, and so SPPS partnered with SchoolMint to develop targeted digital advertising campaigns on the two platforms where busy parents spend their time, Facebook and Instagram.
This critical piece of the Enrollment Project would provide the five partner schools with:
Key to the project’s success was SchoolMint’s ability to create ads in multiple languages for the schools.
By running multilingual ads, SPPS could engage families in a culturally relevant way.
For example, SchoolMint ran ads in Spanish for schools in predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods while also targeting ads in English at families exploring immersion programs (example below).
Above: Example of a school social media ad for Riverview.
“These findings make sense: many Spanish-speaking families want their kids to learn English, so they may be less interested in Spanish immersion — whereas English-speaking families want their children to be bilingual, so they are more interested in language immersion,” Wacker explains.
“For our Hmong school, English ads also performed better than ads in Hmong, which we wouldn’t have known if we didn’t test it in this way.”
While school social media advertising was a cornerstone of the Enrollment Project, SPPS’s success was equally driven by its grassroots, on-the-ground community engagement efforts.
“The schools that did both online advertising and on-the-ground outreach were the ones that had the most success,” Wacker points out.
This dual approach allowed SPPS to play to its strengths — fostering trust and relationships within the community — while leveraging SchoolMint’s expertise in digital marketing to reach a broader audience. The combination created a powerful synergy, amplifying each school’s message across both digital and physical spaces.
“Having SchoolMint manage the digital side made it possible for us to run this campaign effectively,” Wacker says.
By leaving the technical aspects of advertising to SchoolMint, SPPS’s staff could focus on what they do best: direct engagement with families through events, personal interactions, and school tours.
SchoolMint’s ability to handle the complexities of digital marketing ensured the schools could maximize their reach and visibility without overburdening staff. Simultaneously, SPPS’s grassroots efforts built trust and demonstrated their commitment to the community, creating a strong foundation for sustained enrollment growth.
The Enrollment Project delivered remarkable results for SPPS, reversing a decade-long decline and proving that strategic marketing can have a profound impact on school district enrollment.
For the 2024–2025 school year, SPPS is projecting their first enrollment increase in 10 years, adding 400 students — far exceeding initial expectations.
The schools participating in the Enrollment Project saw year-over-year growth, validating the targeted approach.
Each of the five schools SchoolMint worked with experienced increased enrollment (based on preliminary enrollment data):
In fact, Wacker notes, Riverview had enough interest to add an additional kindergarten class!
SPPS initially set a modest goal: to stop the decline and maintain stable enrollment numbers. However, despite projections forecasting a continued decline, the district’s enrollment increased significantly.
Their digital advertising campaign generated more than 150 warm “leads” — families who expressed interest in enrolling — a metric SPPS had not previously tracked.
One of the successes of SPPS’s Enrollment Project was the way SchoolMint’s targeted social media advertising expanded awareness of the district’s schools to family audiences they hadn’t effectively engaged before.
By using SchoolMint to tailor ads to specific community demographics and needs, SPPS connected with new families and increased each school’s overall visibility within their immediate community.
Above: Example of a social media ad for Highwood Hills Elementary.
“We were able to use digital advertising to introduce our schools to families who might not have otherwise considered us,” explains Wacker. “SchoolMint helped us reach families who hadn’t been part of the conversation before.”
Now SPPS can ensure future outreach aligns with community priorities and makes families feel wanted at the school.
“This was a learning experience for everyone. Some of our schools didn’t even have Facebook pages, and they definitely don’t have marketing staff. We simply can’t do this ‘in house,’” Wacker says. “SchoolMint did all the monitoring, the A/B testing, and changing the targeting and timing. Our principals were able to be completely hands-off.”
The success of the Enrollment Project is a stepping stone for SPPS’s future efforts. Four of the six original schools will continue working with SchoolMint on new digital ad campaigns along with two additional schools.
“We want to keep building on the momentum those schools had,” Wacker says.
Further, she adds, “This year, I’m excited about the addition of Google ads because yes, a lot of people use Facebook and Instagram, but it’s smart that we’re expanding the digital footprint of this to Google too to see how that impacts enrollment.”
The insights gained from SchoolMint’s campaign management — such as the effectiveness of multilingual ads and the importance of clear school branding — are now part of SPPS’s long-term strategy.
“This year’s increase was higher than projected, and it gives us hope we’re starting to turn the trend around,” says Wacker. “One year does not make a trend, but this success shows what’s possible when we invest in targeted strategies and partnerships like the one we have with SchoolMint.”
The Enrollment Project demonstrated that reversing a long-time trend of declining student enrollment is not just possible — it’s achievable with the right leadership, a strong commitment to meeting families where they are, and SchoolMint’s modern marketing tactics.
For over 10 years, SchoolMint has been helping schools and districts attract and enroll more students through a range of tailored enrollment marketing services, including:
Discover how we can help you attract new families in today’s competitive student enrollment environment!