Enrollment at Alexandria’s troubled Jefferson-Houston School for Arts and Academics has dropped again, leaving the school with only a third of the students it once had and strengthening the case to change its curriculum or close the facility.

Official figures show 232 students enrolled this year, a drop of more than 17 percent from the 281 children in last year’s student body. At its peak during the 1999-2000 academic year, the school had 669 students.

While enrollment at Jefferson-Houston has fallen 65 percent, the school system’s overall population has fallen 6.7 percent in the same period.

The school has also failed to meet state benchmarks for standardized test scores in the past three years and failed federal standards in two of the past three years.

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Superintendent Rebecca Perry raised the possibility of closing Jefferson-Houston during the school board’s recent retreat.

Jefferson-Houston’s population plunge coincides with the opening of a new elementary school and the school board’s 1999 decisions to redistrict the school’s catchment area and implement an arts integration curriculum.

“Fundamentally, the problem is the district is created to accumulate poverty in a single building,” said Trey Hanbury, president of the Upper King Street Neighborhood Association. Jefferson-Houston’s district includes most of the city’s public housing developments.

Jefferson-Houston was overcrowded before Tucker Elementary School opened in the fall of 2000, school board member Scott Newsham said. His daughters attended Jefferson-Houston.

Newsham attributed Jefferson-Houston’s biggest enrollment drop to Tucker’s opening, since many of the west end students who had been bussed to Jefferson-Houston were redistricted to Tucker. There was a waiting list to attend Jefferson-Houston in the first year the arts integration program was offered, Newsham said.

Thursday, the school board is scheduled to vote on suspending Jefferson-Houston’s arts integration focus. The state Department of Education suggested the change when Alexandria administrators lobbied the department not to deny its accreditation in September.

The change would allow teachers to focus solely on academics, schools spokeswoman Amy Carlini said.

Others, like Hanbury, worry it is too little too late.

“This is a small part of the problem,” Hanbury said.

mhegstad@dcexaminer.com