Idaho's schools are shrinking but ours aren't, The Village gets a date, and 94 with morning smoke

Check the sky before you send anyone out the door — the forecast has patchy smoke hanging around until about 7 a.m., then it burns off into a 94-degree afternoon. Week two of school starts in it.

In today's issue: Idaho's public schools have quietly lost more than five thousand students since 2022, which is not the story you'd expect from the fastest-growing state in the country — and West Ada is the exception that explains the rule. The Village's long-promised final expansion finally has an opening window, and we now know which restaurants are in it. Boise State's athletics department is looking at a hole that could reach $18 million. Six new things to do, two of them Saturday. Let's get into it.

🧠 Trivia: Idaho has added population every single year this decade, but its public schools have been losing students since 2022. How many fewer kids are enrolled today than at the peak? (Answer at the bottom.)

Two things inside the next seven days this week, both on Saturday, and both new here. Worth saying plainly: tonight's Monday Night Market and Friday's Legendary Ladies Night at the Speedway are both happening and both already ran in this newsletter, so they're not listed below. Go anyway. All six items here are new to this newsletter and every one of them is physically in Meridian — no out-of-town exception needed today.

Saturday, Aug 22

Wednesday, Aug 26

Saturday, Aug 29

Saturday, Sep 5

Monday, Sep 7 (Labor Day)

Ninth issue running that the next-seven-days window is thin. If you know something happening in Meridian that never makes it onto a calendar — a church thing, a park thing, a garage-sale-that-is-really-an-event thing — hit reply. That's the gap, and readers are the only ones who can fill it.

🌫️ Patchy smoke before 7 a.m., then partly sunny and hot. High near 94, low around 62. Wind south-southeast at 5 to 7 mph in the morning, swinging west-northwest in the afternoon. No rain chance. The smoke is the part that matters at the school bus stop — it should be thinning by the time the first bell goes, but the early walk is the worst of it.

☀️ No active weather alerts this morning. Saturday's Red Flag Warning expired and was not renewed, and there's no DEQ air quality advisory as of this writing. The only thing still sitting on the National Weather Service hazard list for Meridian is a Hydrologic Outlook, which is the least dramatic item they publish.

📅 The week out: Tue 92, Wed 92, Thu 94, Fri 95, Sat 91. Every day in the 90s, every night in the high 50s or low 60s. Friday is the peak. If you have anything to do outdoors this week, do it before nine in the morning — that advice hasn't changed in three weeks and it isn't going to.

Fine print: the NWS feed went stale again overnight — it's serving yesterday's snapshot, the fifth time this month it has refreshed once and then frozen. Monday's number was cross-checked against the live Boise readings, which are showing 94s through the middle of the week, so 94 is published as-is. Plan for the mid-90s and treat the afternoon as the uncertain part.

Here's a fact that will not match your experience of living here. Idaho's public school enrollment has fallen by 5,104 students since it peaked in fall 2022 — from 315,254 down to 310,150 — while the state's population climbed past two million. Idaho is growing and its classrooms are emptying at the same time.

The reason is almost entirely about age. The decline is concentrated in the youngest grades: K–3 enrollment is down 5,151 students since 2021-22, while middle and high school enrollment keeps rising. Those older kids were born before the drop. Idaho's birth rate fell from over 16 per 1,000 residents in 2007 to under 12 per 1,000 in 2024, and according to Idaho Department of Labor economist Lisa Grigg, just 8% of the state's population growth from 2020 to 2025 was school-aged children. People are moving here in enormous numbers. They're mostly not bringing kids.

Which brings it home, because the sharpest decline in Idaho is next door. The Boise School District has lost more than 1,600 students in five years — the largest drop in the state — and is cutting 17 staff positions ahead of this school year. Births inside Boise's attendance areas fell 14.5% between 2015 and 2024. But district spokesperson Dan Hollar named the other half out loud: families are relocating to neighboring communities because Boise housing is expensive.

They relocate to here. That is the whole shape of it — West Ada opened a brand-new elementary school this month while the district over the hill trims staff, and the gap between those two facts is a mortgage payment. Worth knowing for the next time somebody at a school board meeting says growth is a burden: statewide, the burden is going the other way, and 38 Idaho districts finished last fiscal year in "protected" funding mode so a bad attendance year can't cost them more than 3%.

Idaho Education News (Emma Epperly and Colby Kistner), published Aug 12.

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This has been "coming soon" for so long that people stopped believing it, so here are the dates. The first round of stores in The Village's final expansion phase opens at the end of September or early October, a second batch lands just before the holidays, and the last group arrives in the first quarter of 2027. Hugh Crawford, VP of property management at The Village, put it about as plainly as a property executive can: "It's been a long time... and it's something we've been wanting to get done."

The scale: roughly 80,000 to 90,000 square feet of new space across six buildings, 12 retail stores and four restaurants, and it is already fully pre-leased — while the existing centre sits at 100% occupancy. This was planned before The Village opened in 2013.

The names now confirmed between the city and the developer's own announcements: Apple, Capital Grille, Culinary Dropout, Pottery Barn, Williams Sonoma, Kendra Scott, Paris Baguette, Flower Child, solidcore, Vuori, Alo, Tecovas, Gorjana, 7th Avenue and Tempur-Pedic. Culinary Dropout takes about 7,000 square feet; Williams Sonoma about 5,550.

Whether that's good news depends entirely on what you want Meridian to be, and this newsletter isn't going to tell you. What's not in dispute is that a fine-dining steakhouse and an Apple store are a different proposition than a Cheesecake Factory, and that the tax base and the traffic on Eagle Road both go up.

Not new news — Idaho News 6 (Kalkidan Meyer) reported the phasing in mid-July and the tenant announcements ran through June and July. It's here because the opening window is now close enough to matter, and this newsletter had never carried it.

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The one out-of-town item today, and it earns the space because half this town owns something orange and blue. Boise State's athletic department told the State Board of Education on Thursday that its deficit could reach $14 to $18 million this fiscal year. Board policy requires the notification. Last year they finished $2 million in the red, cushioned by an $11.5 million surplus the year before that came from the College Football Playoff run and a Post Malone concert at Albertsons Stadium. Neither of those is repeating.

Two causes. First, paying players: Boise State paid athletes $10 million last fiscal year, the first year that was legal, and expects to go higher. The House v. NCAA settlement caps it at $21.3 million and the school says it won't get near that. Athletic Director Jeramiah Dickey: "We are falling behind... We don't need what everyone else has. We just need more than we currently have."

Second, the Pac-12 move cost real money. The Mountain West sued the five departing schools for $55 million in exit fees; it settled this month at a reported $70 million total, just under $10 million each. Boise State's athletics operating expenses rose about $7.6 million year over year, attributed to the exit.

Before anyone panics: State Board Executive Director Jennifer White said this isn't a structural deficit at the university, which has reserves to absorb it. And a federal GAO report found 94% of Division I athletics programs lost money in 2023-24, with a median gap of $20.6 million. Losing money on college sports is the norm, not the scandal. Luke Combs plays Albertsons Stadium in 2027, which is part of the plan.

Idaho Education News (Ryan Suppe), published Aug 13.

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Brought to you by Meridian Local Scoop. What's faster than word of mouth? The Meridian Local Business Spotlight! Keeps you up to speed on what's happening around town — and connects local businesses to our community.

Week two. Somebody in this house is still enthusiastic about the pickup line.

5,104 students. Enrollment peaked at 315,254 in fall 2022 and sits at 310,150 today.

The interesting part isn't the number, it's where the loss sits. Every one of those students is missing from the bottom of the system — K–3 is down 5,151 since 2021-22 while middle and high school enrollment is still climbing. That's not families leaving Idaho. That's a birth-rate curve arriving at kindergarten, roughly five years behind schedule, and it will keep walking up through the grades for the next decade.

There's a second squeeze underneath it. Idaho funds schools on average daily attendance, not enrollment, and last year the gap between the two was 17,760 students — about $172 million at the going per-student rate. Districts pay for buses and lunches based on how many kids are on the roll, and get paid based on how many show up. Rewriting that thirty-year-old formula is back on the state's to-do list, again.