School Officials Seeing Early Impact Of New Development

ORLEANS – If you build it, they will come.

For town officials and housing advocates, the famous line from “Field of Dreams” aptly applies to the town’s ongoing pursuit of affordable and workforce housing for the region’s year-round population. The hope continues to be that as more housing comes online, local schools will benefit in the form of boosted student enrollment.

And with the opening of one such development, the 62-unit Phare/Pennrose project at the site of the former Cape Cod Five headquarters on West Road, the impact at Orleans Elementary School may already be evident.

OES Principal Elaine Pender said that the school has enrolled an additional 21 students since the start of the current school year in September, a number she said is well outside of the school’s “norm.” 

“We might have a few trickle in little by little throughout the year, but we noticed this was very different this year,” she said, adding that students have continued to enroll into the spring.

And while the hard data linking those gains to housing isn’t there, Pender said it isn’t hard to make the connection.

“You have these two things that happened in the same year,” she said. “You have the increased housing and 20-plus move-ins. They both happened at the same time, so you can correlate that.”

Sasandra Roche, chair of the Orleans Elementary School committee, told the select board and finance committee during a joint meeting on the Nauset school budgets March 25 that analytics aren’t necessary to see the impact that new housing is having on the school.

“If you are on West Road around 2:20, you’ll see seven little people pop off [the school bus],” she said. 

The additional students come in the midst of a trend of declining enrollment in the Nauset district. At OES, the projected enrollment for fiscal 2027 is 149 students in kindergarten through fifth grade, down just slightly from the 150 students enrolled in fiscal years 2025 and 2026. But a longer view of the school’s enrollment history better highlights the trend toward fewer students. In 2000, for example, the school housed 275 students. 

Roche said the elementary school lost a total of 13 students this year to a combination of transfers, homeschooling and families moving out of the district. An outgoing fifth grade class of 22 students last year was replaced this fall with an incoming kindergarten class of 20 students, she said.

But Roche said she sees the increased in-year enrollment as a reflection of “the positive impact of the new housing initiatives in town.”

 “Despite these fluctuations, we remain optimistic about future enrollment as more housing opportunities become available,” she said.

A lottery held in April 2025 for the Phare units yielded 616 applications for the 62 units. About half of those applicants were those who live, work or have children attending school in Orleans.

All of the Phare units are being rented as affordable housing. Those include 10 that will be rented to individuals who make up to 80 percent of the area median income in Barnstable County, 43 that are rented to those who make up to 60 percent of AMI and nine that are rented to those who make up to 30 percent of AMI.

In addition to the Phare project, a 14-unit affordable housing development at the site of the former Masonic Lodge at 107 Main St. was completed in October. That project was developed by the Housing Assistance Corporation, which is also redeveloping the property that formerly housed the Governor Prence Inn on Route 6A alongside Habitat for Humanity Cape Cod and Preservation of Affordable Housing.

On the opposite end of Route 6A on Nells Way, Maple Hurst Builders has begun construction at the site of the former underground mall. The mixed-use project includes 29 units of workforce housing as well as retail space. 

In her comments on March 25, Roche praised Pender and her staff for adjusting to meet the needs of students amidst the changes in enrollment.

“Because of the talented staff at OES, Principal Pender has been able to design programming to meet incoming students’ needs by shifting staff,” she said.

It remains to be seen if this year’s enrollment spike is an anomaly or indicative of a broader change in student enrollment, Pender said. But she said the school’s overall charge of accommodating the town’s elementary-age students and families remains, regardless of the number.

“What if 21 kids came in one grade? You have to be able to respond to the changes in a very easy way, a way that is comfortable for all families,” she said.