Ordinance 3254-12 - Laserfiche WebLink

IV. STUDENT ENROLLMENT PROJECTIONS Projected Student Enrollment 2010-2015 Enrollment projections are generally most accurate for the initial years of the forecast period. Beyond the 5-6 year range,projected assumptions about economic or demographic trends may prove false, resulting in an enrollment trend that is quite different from the projection. For this reason is important to monitor birth rates,new housing construction, and population growth on an annual basis as part of facilities management. In the event that enrollment growth slows, plans for new facilities can be delayed. It is much more difficult,however, to initiate new projects or speed up projects when enrollment growth exceeds projections. For this reason, it is sometimes useful to project slightly more growth than might be expected so as to be better prepared for future events. The Growth Management Act(GMA)requires that planning for public facilities be consistent with the 20-year population projections developed by the Office of Finance and Management (OFM) for the State of Washington. The District has contracted with a consultant to develop a methodology for projections. The consultant has an twenty-year history of working with local school districts in doing projections, including seven years as the demographer for the Seattle Public Schools and eleven years as an independent consultant providing long-range projections for the Highline, Edmonds, Puyallup, Federal Way, Marysville, Seattle,Northshore, Bethel, South Kitsap, Bremerton, and Mukilteo school districts.The methodology employed by the consultant is a variation of the cohort survival method. Cohort survival compares enrollment at a particular grade in a specific year,to the enrollment at the previous grade from the prior year. For example, enrollment at the first grade is compared to the previous year's kindergarten enrollment. The ratio of these two numbers(first grade enrollment divided by kindergarten enrollment) creates a"progression ratio"providing a summary measure of the in-and-out migration that has occurred over the course of a year. This ratio can be calculated for each grade level. Once these ratios have been established over a period of years they can be averaged and/or weighted to predict the enrollment at each grade. Cohort survival works well for every grade but kindergarten where there is no previous grade to use for comparison. At the kindergarten level enrollment is compared to the county birth cohort from five years prior to estimate a birth-to-k ratio. This ratio, averaged over several years, provides a method for predicting what proportion of the birth cohort will enroll at the kindergarten level. The District's percentage of this cohort has varied considerably over the past 7 years from a high of 14.2%to a low of 11.8%. Future forecasts assume that the District will enroll about 12%of the birth cohort. Cohort survival is a purely mathematical method,which assumes that future enrollment patterns will be similar to past enrollment patterns. It makes no assumptions about what is causing enrollment gains or losses and can be easily applied to any enrollment history. For this reason, cohort survival is a useful tool that anyone can use for projecting school enrollments. Despite these advantages,cohort survival can produce forecast errors because it does not consider possible changes in demographic trends. New housing,in particular, can produce enrollment gains that might not otherwise be predicted from past trends. Or, alternatively, a district may lose market share to private or other public schools. It is also possible that a slowdown in population growth will dampen enrollment gains. This appears to be what 10