This week, City Schools of Decatur released their latest enrollment levels and projections for next year as part of Superintendent Phyllis Edwards’ letter to the board for next week’s meeting.
As you can see above, enrollment levels are projected to increase by nearly 400 students from this year to next. Then, yesterday, the Bill Banks of AJC reported that the Superintendent ” wants a joint meeting with the city government discussing the revival of three large apartment projects and their effect on city schools.”
According to the paper, “two developments totaling a projected 435 units figure to break ground next year, with a third, on the Callaway property, approximately two years away. Decatur schools anticipate total enrollment doubling to over 6,000 by 2018, but Edwards said these new apartments “don’t figure into our projections.” ”
An enrollment of 6,000 would be higher than CSD has ever encountered in its history. (See CSD growth chart from 2012 below.)
I’m guessing the 2018 projection assumes no deviations from current growth.
Well, if the crowd that I always see in Oakhurst is any indication…. things are really getting intense. It’s almost like you aren’t allowed in Oakhurst unless you have a kid under 5. I’ve never seen so many kids per capita! 🙂
Back in the 90s I got a school bus stopped moved from in front of my house because there were NO FAMILIES WITH CHILDREN anywhere near us and the kids taking the bus were unsupervised and acting in an unsafe manner (jumping in front of cars, throwing trash about and generally behaving like normal unsupervised 14 year olds). Now I look around and wonder who these people and their kids are and when they showed up. It is crazy.
It’s because they closed three elementary schools over a 3 year period. I swear it! I saw it on a graph!
What I get out of this graph: the way to increase enrollment is to close several elementary schools.
Just kidding. But it does illustrate that a graph is not enough. It only shows a time trend, nothing behind what’s causing that trend, the important stuff. E.g. demographic trends, gentrification, what’s happening in nearby school systems to motivate families to move, etc. Just a word to the wise not to use the past to predict the future or oversimplify your model and assumptions. I was sure the recession was going to stabilize or decrease enrollment eventually because fertility is supposed to drop in recessions; but many other factors were in play. Who knows what’s coming next?—a bad choice in a future Superintendent, a sudden revitalization of the DeKalb County School System, a new trend for the upper middle class to homeschool their children or send them to private school, or some other future event could have impacts that we have to detect early so we can plan and respond.
Not to fall into the “narration fallacy”, but it seems like a real potential factor is overcrowded schools, which could lessen demand.
I was going to list that outcome but then I thought, “We’ll just put in trailers then use SPLOST XXIII to fund additions onto our schools. Westchester may eventually stretch over Scott to encompass the land on which apartments (teeming with those revenue-negative children) now sit.”
I had to look up “narrative fallacy”. According to Wikipedia: “Another issue is the “narrative fallacy”[13] which refers to our tendency to construct stories around facts, which in love for example may serve a purpose, but when someone begins to believe the stories and accommodate facts into the stories, they are likely to err.” Yeah, I think we do this in Decatur all the time. It’s satisfying. We could have a whole thread about our fallible institutional memories and the stories we like to weave about ourselves in Decatur. But we have to keep it out of our projections and planning or we mess up big-time.
Yes, I’m highly skeptical of a future enrollment projection of 6,000. It seems to be based on straight line extension of recent trend, which I think is a flawed approach.
– As enrollment increases, perceived quality may diminish and curb growth.
– As enrollment increases, taxes likely have to go up, which may curb growth.
– There has to be an upper limit, mathematically speaking, of possible student enrollment. A saturation level. A city with X number of housing units could theoretically only provide living arrangements for Y number of children. What are X and Y, and how are they changing? What if we’ve already reached Y, and don’t have the possibility of another 50% of growth?
+1
That’s Number Wang!
When did you get back?
Getting back to narrative fallacy, is that what happened in APS or what? Beverly Hall was getting AWARDS from intelligent people and trustworthy organizations for her success in improving student performance. Now, it seems so obvious that it was all an improbable scam. It is TOO easy to be fooled by the narrative. Recognizing and speaking the truth is hard.
While fertility may drop during a recession, those that do have children will be more price sensitive to the cost of education and seek alternatives to private school… like Decatur! In addition, Decatur’s working population was less impacted by the recession – our employment base skews to industries that are less sensitive to the economy: higher education and healthcare.
Bottom line – the CSD needs to do a better job anticipating the growth in demand using data, not assumptions. A model is only as good as the assumptions, and those of us walking around with strollers at the time of the original redistricting all new the assumptions were wrong.
The right wasy to tackle this issue and appropriately measure it would be to launch an annual statistically sized survey of existing and new residents to measure:
1) the number of kids under 5
2) the parents intent to enroll them in CSD
3) the parents intent to have additional children in the next 2 years
4) the residents intent to relocate (which then opens up a residence for a new family with kids to enter)
Combine this with building permit data to identify the number of new residences, and a model can be built that will provide a reasonably accurate projection for 3-5 years out.
There was a very data driven analysis by CSD’s enrollment committee last year. The latest projections are based on the most aggressive model.
As for forecasting based on stated intent, I’m not sure that gives me much more comfort than doing it on a finite set of assumptions.
I’ll be curious to see if that net gain of 12 for the high school holds… as DHS continues to get better and better, I’m guessing those enrollment trends change.
We can also hope and work towards a changing state environment towards education as the economy continues to recover, which may help a bit with our growth projections. I’d be curious to see numbers out of the District Office that report the decrease in per pupil funds from the state over that past 5 years (or even 10, w/ the change in party from D to R).
Have I mentioned lately how happy I am that I don’t have kids. To all you who do, you’re welcome. You all owe me a beer…
You’re on your own for the beer. Since it costs $60 billion these days to raise a child, we parents can’t afford other people’s beer.
And sorry I stole your thunder in FFAF. I remembered your post a while ago about looking forward to GC opening, and thought I would make your day.
You obviously haven’t looked at college prices lately. That would be $60 billion trillion dollars. And HOPE funding, other scholarships and grants, work study, and student loans are all drying up. And the government won’t let you disown your child within five years of college application. And college students are not allowed to declare bankruptcy immediately upon graduation. The new truism is “That and an “international baccalaureate” degree will get you a cup of coffee”! (Disclaimer: some of this is true.)
+1 to the no kids. My wife and I love seeing the tax bill for our house and realizing the majority is going to kids we don’t have! I think all those parents should start dropping off growlers at our house as thanks.
Next time you look at your tax bill, think about the following: all the kids in Decatur, and the schools they (along with our hard-earned tax dollars) help make so vibrant and successful, are economically beneficial to our city. First of all, they drive up property values considerably. Simply having a home in CoD compared to Dekalb county probably drives up home values by 20%, right (someone with more expertise can weigh in here)? That’s tens of thousands of dollars to your average homeowner. There could actually be a net gain for many people when they sell their house. Second, all the kids are a big reason our downtown (and Oakhurst Village) are so appealing. Take away the kids, you also take away many of the great businesses, which also add value to our community. In a broader sense, it’s true that we pay to educate and take care of children in our society, but they will repay that debt and them some when they enter the workforce, paying for the social security and healthcare of people are living longer and longer. No kids, no funding for the government, no safety net for the elderly. And no, social security IS NOT a stand-alone program. That myth was exploded long ago.
Just asking ya’ll to look at this in a bit broader way than just your tax bill. Maybe you should drop off a six-pack at the house full of kids down the street. I’m sure the parents need it…
If there’s any social security to fund by the time I hit retirement, I’ll by the beers.
Don’t have kids, do like them just fine. Believe public education is a cornerstone of a free society and that everybody has to help pay for it because everybody benefits (and everybody suffers when we don’t give it its due). That being said, I also feel compelled to point out that some of us found Decatur, and particularly Oakhurst, utterly charming and desirable 15 years ago before it became wall to wall kids. I’d even go so far as to say it’s the people who were here back then, and in the decades before, making Decatur’s neighborhoods the great communities that they are, who made the place so appealing for the hordes of spawners that have descended upon us.
Hope this doesn’t sound combative, don’t mean it that way. For all I know, you’ve lived here longer than I have. Just sayin’.
Most of those people who came before did have children; they’re just grown-ups now. I was talking to a neighbor in Oakhurst, a black woman in her 70s or 80s (my mother taught me never to ask a woman her age), and she told me how much she enjoys having kids around. She said that it reminds her of when she first came here in the 1960s.
Don’t forget that those people who made Oakhurst so appealing in the decades before you came here were most likely the “spawners” of their day.
STG was, like me, here long before most of you would have found Oakhurst appealing.
No doubt you have, and no slight was intended. I was just pointing out – using her language – that although there weren’t as many kids 15 years ago, 60 years ago the place was swarming with kids.
My grandparents and their kids lived here then (not me, since I was born in 1969), and it was very much a family oriented suburb.
it did kind of sound that way. I am sorry to be snappy, too.
Why the disconnect between CSD and Planning and Zoning, who are allowing this new crush of residential in the City?? Decatur is already at least 80% residential, and the City thinks we need more? Really?!? It’s basic knowledge that residential costs a city money to provide services, like schools – whereas, commercial will generally make money for a city. I thought Decatur would do a better job of understanding this balance.
After posting three times on this thread, I’ve realized that I don’t understand the column headings across the top of the posted table. It took me a while but I finally realized that you get Column 3, Current + New Enrollement, by adding the Current Enrollment from the row (year) above to the New Enrollment for the same row (year). But how do you get from the Current + New Enrollment in Column 3 to Projected Enrollment in Column 4? Clicking on the link didn’t help me. Is this where the modelling assumptions and magic come in? Is there a brief explanation for the lay reader? Thanks!
I don’t understand the table at all (and making sense of tabular data is one of the things I do for a living). 99% of anybody has no business being allowed to use PowerPoint.
I’m seeing bad Excel. Bad PowerPoint doesn’t require you to spin your head to make sense of it – you just reel immediately.
I take back my comment. It IS bad PP, now that I’ve noticed the title of the graph. “what research tells us?” More like “what data illustrates to date.” Plotting historical data is not “research.” It is simply plotting historical data.
I have come to accept that what is called “research” in the primary and secondary school world is a unique definition of research. In that world, it means someone actually looked something up somewhere or measured something. And I have decided that all masters and PhD level education degrees need to have an entire course on how to display data accurately. Never mind interpreting the data, which DM has now taught me is an example of “narrative fallacy”.
You are cautiously skirting the dangerous line in criticizing the quantitative analytical rigor of an MS or PhD in Education 🙂
(of which I often concur, but my academic colleagues with such graduate degrees are quite touchy and/or defensive when this is brought up …)
STG, I understand why you are confused. It is a bad table. I think this is what it means:
Current Enrollment = how many students there are this school year, 2012-2013
Current Enrollment + New = how many new students there will be next school year–so you have to shift to the next grade level to see the correctly added numbers. For example, 1st grade 2012-2013 has 371 students. Only 3 new students will be enrolled next school year with that cohort, so now you’re looking at the row for grade two. So the grade 2 current + new = 374. However, CSD is *projecting* a larger number of 395 for School year 2013-2014. So that means by next school year, CSD is projecting that an additional 21 new 2nd graders will be entering the system.
At least that’s my interpretation 🙂
My question is where do they get the “New Enrollment for 2013-2014” numbers? Is this people who have already moved and registered their children here? I’m assuming, then, they are projecting that more students will come in over the summer, hence the much higher numbers for the “Projected Enrollment for 2013-2014”
I’m just relieved that CSD leaders and City Commissioners wil be having a sit-down soon. I’m generally in favor of development that makes Decatur a more vibrant, walkable, accessible community, but I really worry about the burden of new residential development on CSD. We can’t pretend that these new apartments won’t affect enrollment.
Please, dear leaders, get a handle on the school system BEFORE adding any more residential property, whether by annexation or by new development!
Good news at Patch: “Decatur Schools, City Hall To Meet Jointly
The two groups will talk twice a year about school enrollment and other subjects.”
http://decatur.patch.com/articles/decatur-schools-and-city-hall-should-they-powwow-on-developments?ncid=newsltuspatc00000001
If home prices have increased dramatically (or more recently maintained a premium) due to purchase demand from families with kids moving in;
What will happen to home prices when we hit 5,000 students and people with kids decide buying in decatur is not such a good idea anymore?
It appears the unincorporated school tax rate is the same as that for the city of Decatur.
http://web.co.dekalb.ga.us/TaxCommissioner/pdf/Millage.pdf
I’m proud of CDS. But a real estate appraiser asked me the following: If CDS have cause a dramatic increase in home values, how do you account for home values increasing at the same rate in an area outside the City ie Lake Claire? Thought it a fair question I couldn’t answer.
The schools are *a* factor, but not *the* factor. Mary Lin (assuming in the district) is an equally desirable school and Candler Park’s commercial district has as much or more charm than Oakhurst. All the current trends in real estate — which include more than just schools — are pretty well satisfied by either location.