Demographic Study
Sample Report
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A Demographic Study takes a detailed look at student populations and historic trends in order to predict the future population in the district and at each school.
This information is useful for several purposes:
- Budgeting — Based on enrollment projections
- Determining Staffing Needs
- Looking at future facility needs, both at individual schools and for the entire district
To develop a Demographic Study, SchoolWorks will input past student records into our Geographic Information System. This information is combined with several databases of information which include:
- Birthrate counts for the past ten years compiled by zip codes
- County planning documentation for projected new housing developments
- A comprehensive street and/or parcel file for the entire county
- Classroom count for each School
- Classroom loading standards for each grade
- School Attendance Boundaries and grade configurations
Utilizing all of the data available the projections are generated using an industry standard Cohort trend analysis. The basic projections are created by studying the geographic areas for the District and each individual school. Once the trends are analyzed for each area, the base projections are modified using the following procedures:
Birth rates are used to project future kindergarten enrollment based on the rate of change in the number of births occurring.
New Housing Development rates and yield factors are compared to the historical impact of development and if the future projections exceed the historical values, the projections are augmented accordingly.
Inter-District student counts are not included in the base geographic trend analysis since these are students residing outside of the District. Therefore, the current percentage of students-per-school and per-grade are added to the base projections.
Intra-District students are those who transfer from one school to another. The number of students transferring into and out of each school are calculated and used to determine the difference between the projections for students living in each attendance area versus those that are projected to attend the school.
The projections for special education students and alternative programs are created by assuming those programs typically serve a percentage of the total school population. Therefore as the school grows or declines, those programs would increase or decrease accordingly.
The projections in a standard report are based on current school boundaries and attendance patterns. The maps that would be included show the District boundary and the current distribution of students attending each school.