Although educational leaders have been coping with declining enrollment for almost a decade, educational researchers have begun to focus on the topic only recently. The first part of this introduction to a special issue of the Peabody Journal of Education briefly summarizes the contents of the subsequent essays, which are intended to bridge the gap between researchers and practitioners. The introduction's second part provides a conceptual framework for the essays, discussing the problem of adjusting to declining enrollment as one of determining not only what actions to take, but also how to make unpleasant decisions. The first aspect of the problem, that of "substantive retrenchment policies," concerns revenue-generating policies, cost-cutting policies, and degrees of political divisiveness likely to result from such policies. The second dimension of the problem, that of "process retrenchment policies," involves the management tasks of planning for and obtaining acceptance of a board's decisions, including policies that vary in being of a technical or political nature and in being divisive to differing degrees. Educational leaders' decisions in times of enrollment decline must be based on both efficiency (making cuts for the benefit of the organization as a whole) and equity (distributing cuts across the entire organization). (JBM)