What Happens to the Schools?

The Question Nobody Has Officially Asked

No school capacity letter exists for the 4a and 5b Planning Commision proposal. The last district enrollment study is from 2018, and it already had 198 Elmwood in its pipeline.

This should have a paper trail: if Narberth Borough Council adopts the proposed changes to the 4a and 5b zoning districts, and apartment buildings start going up across the South Side and the Montgomery Avenue corridor, what happens to Belmont Hills Elementary? Note: Belmont Hills currently serves North Narberth however LMSD can send kids anywhere.

We went looking for the answer. There isn’t one. No school capacity letter has been requested from Lower Merion School District as part of this proposal. The most recent comprehensive enrollment study the district has on file is from December 2018. That study is good work, and we relied on it heavily for this article, but it is seven years old, and it already lists 198 Elmwood Avenue as a project in the pipeline at 20 units. The Planning Commission is now proposing a framework that could put considerably more than 20 units on that single parcel, on top of every other qualifying lot in both districts, and nobody has gone back to the district that would actually have to seat these children and asked what that means today.

That is the actual issue here. Not a prediction of crowded classrooms next September. A missing document that should exist before a vote, not after one.

The math that the Borough has avoided

Belmont Hills, the elementary school that serves Narberth’s South North Side, is not currently full. District enrollment data and the 2018 projection model both show it with real room. Lower Merion School District’s own research, drawn from decades of actual student records across more than seventy multifamily buildings, also shows something that cuts against the simplest version of the worry: new, dense, transit-oriented apartment buildings, the kind this proposal is designed to produce, tend to generate fewer school-age children per unit than older garden apartments or townhomes do. The district’s own planning factor for new multifamily construction is 0.06 children per unit (See Pipeline Notesbelow). A reduced-parking building marketed to commuters and downsizing empty nesters is, on the data, not the same animal as a three-bedroom townhouse.

Run that average factor against a realistic build-out across 4a and 5b over the next decade or so, and you get a real number, but a modest one. Most plausible scenarios land somewhere in the range of a few dozen additional students district-wide, not hundreds, and not concentrated in any single September. Lower Merion has absorbed growth of that size before without difficulty. The district added more than 700 students in a single ten-year stretch through ordinary household turnover and existing development, long before anyone proposed rezoning a single parcel in Narberth.

The concern

Belmont Hills has slack today. That slack is not a permanent feature of the building. It is a snapshot, taken at a moment before 4a and 5b open up by-right apartment construction across the same blocks that feed that school. The 2018 district study shows exactly how fast a single elementary catchment area can absorb new units once a few sites turn over. Cynwyd Elementary’s attendance area took in 281 new housing units in just five years, 2013 to 2017, almost entirely from a handful of multifamily projects on Bala Avenue and Righters Ferry Road. A school with room one year can be a school managing real pressure a few years later, not because any one building broke it, but because several buildings arrived in the same catchment area inside the same decade.

That is the real risk with 4a and 5b. Not that any single proposed building overloads Belmont Hills by itself. It is that this rezoning does not get evaluated as one parcel at a time.

It opens the door, by right, across an entire district, at the same moment Narberth’s South Side is also absorbing whatever else moves through the pipeline over the same years. Slack that looks comfortable today can disappear the way it did in Cynwyd, and the Borough has produced no analysis of whether that is likely here, because nobody asked the district to produce one.

What should exist and does not

A responsible zoning amendment of this scope should be accompanied by a current capacity letter from Lower Merion School District, built on this proposal’s actual unit counts and density bonuses, not the 2018 study’s. It should account for the cumulative effect of 4a and 5b development landing on Belmont Hills at the same time as whatever else is already in motion elsewhere in the district’s pipeline. It should say plainly whether the building has room for that combined load, or whether it does not.

That letter does not exist. The Planning Commission’s recommendation has gone forward without it. We are asking, formally and on the record, that the Commission either produce this analysis before any vote or explain in writing why it considers an updated, cumulative school capacity assessment unnecessary for a proposal of this scale. Given that the original site at the center of this debate was already known to the district’s own planners back in 2018, that is not an unreasonable thing to ask for in 2026.

We would rather make this case with a real answer in hand than with a guess, ours or anyone else’s. Right now, nobody has the real answer. That is a problem, and it is one the Borough can still fix before this goes to a vote.

Pipeline Notes

There is a practice called “address-of-convenience” renting – leasing a small apartment within a desirable school district boundary to establish enrollment eligibility while maintaining a primary residence (or cheaper rental) elsewhere. WHYY’s reporting on the Philadelphia suburban districts found that hundreds, possibly thousands, of students are removed each year from suburban school districts for residency fraud, and the practice is documented enough that LMSD maintains a formal “Multiple Occupancy Registration” form for families sharing an address with a district resident, which explicitly states that LMSD may conduct surveillance and home visits to verify compliance, and that false claims can result in criminal prosecution and civil liability for full tuition reimbursement. The existence of that form is itself evidence that the district treats this as a real and recurring phenomenon.

Renter-occupied units account for 37.1% of Narberth’s housing stock (2015-2019 ACS), which is higher than both Montgomery County (28.4%) and Lower Merion Township (26.3%). The rental stock in Narberth is disproportionately large relative to every neighboring geography. Roughly 770 of Narberth’s ~2,077 housing units are renter-occupied. Even a small fraction of those being address-of-convenience rentals represents a meaningful enrollment change

The 0.6 children per unit figure, used above, is a district-wide average. It reflects all multifamily housing across Lower Merion’s 23+ square miles – including expensive Gladwyne condos, upscale Bryn Mawr rental buildings, and every other context in the district. If Narberth’s rental housing and that of the local area is attracting a specific subset of renter – families who chose to rent there specifically because of LMSD access rather than price or space – then Narberth’s actual yield per rental unit could be meaningfully higher than the district average. The standard yield rate would understate enrollment impact for the area specifically.

The economic incentive – and it’s large

The economic angle. The question: how much does a family pay in rent premium to be in Narberth vs. the nearest comparable geography outside LMSD? That premium is basically, what they’re paying for school access.

Narberth 1-bedroom apartments average approximately $2,200/month as of 2025, while Upper Darby 1-bedroom apartments average approximately $1,100/month over the same period. The differential is roughly $1,100/month – about $13,200/year for a comparable unit just across the district line. Zumper Narberth,Zumper Upper Darby

Now compare that to what’s being purchased. LMSD spends $29,930 per student per year. A family with two school-age children is effectively accessing approximately $60,000/year in educational services for a rent premium of $13,200. Even accounting for the smaller, less comfortable apartment they’re presumably occupying, the economics are highly favorable relative to any private school alternative. The implied “tuition” calculation is quantifiable and substantial.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Our Narberth, Inc., its board, or its members.