Keeping An Eye on Student Enrollment – June ’15 Update
Decatur Metro | July 14, 2015 | 12:07 pm
Overall, CSD’s student enrollment projections the past few years have been impressively accurate. We continually owe a debt of gratitude to school staff and the enrollment committee for all their work in this area. Looking at the latest, total CSD enrollment #s for the following year (see below), we are currently at 96% of the projection, just like we were in June of last year.
And while the estimated projection is very important for CSD to focus on, we all should also be keeping an eye on total enrollment vs. last year.
In that department, total enrollment growth thru June vs. last year is up (+227 students in ’15 vs. +170 students in ’14). This increase is mainly due to larger classes in the lower grades taking the place of the smaller upper grade classes as they graduate from the system.
For the last 4 years, the size of the larger, younger classes has been remarkably consistent – hovering in the low to mid 400s. CSD is racing to keep up with these steady, but large 400+ grades that are slowly moving up the grade ladder and replacing the 300-400 student class sizes from 5th – 10th grade and the remaining 200-300 s size classes in 11th and 12th grade.
As so many of the city’s most important discussions in 2015 revolve around student enrollment (school expansion, taxes, etc), this is a very important document to keep an eye on.
Sorry to nitpick, but that “Difference” column is a bit confusing at first glance. A better label would be “2015 Actual vs. Expected Difference” or something that. That way it would be clear right away that the numbers being compared are the 2015 Expected and the 2015 Actual numbers, not the 2014 numbers with either of the 2015 numbers.
Fathers of Rising 10th Graders,
We salute you.
Clearly, you not only brought home the bacon . . . you made sure there was plenty of oink in it too.
Ah yes. The ice storm of 2000. Good times.
OK, time to schedule the “tag a trailer” event to help beautify our new learning cottages and maybe put off some potential new residents looking at our school buildings.
Potential new residents are not “scared off” by trailers. They see an overly crowded Decatur system as better than their current option, which is usually within 10 minutes of the Decatur city limits. However, Decatur can’t educate every K-12 kid in the intown Atlanta area whose parents opt for public school. Ppl ought to consider working to make their own schools better rather than just moving to Decatur a few months before their child starts Kg.
So maybe things aren’t growing quite as fast as we thought and maybe a huge tax increase to go on a building spree is not absolutely necessary?
Not to mention whether said growth will be sustainable over the 50 year life of these new buildings.
The planned building spree was only going to meet 90% of the projected need without annexation. So undershooting the projected need by a few percentage points does not mean there will be a large surplus of capacity, particularly if the annexation ball gets rolling again.
Plus, there is a big bump in enrollment the first week of the school year. We will probably end up slightly exceeding projections.
I would also expect a slight jump once the new apartments are completed.
Great point. There is so much residential building happening right now in town.
I’m sure there’ll be some kids in the downtown apartments but I’m still not convinced those apartments represent a particularly inviting way to get into the district for a family with school-aged kids. For example, a 2 BR 2 BA apartment at the Place on Ponce will run between $2,000 and $2,700. For people with kids (the vast majority of which statistically “prefer” a single family home), it’s still possible to get into a house at that price.
Of course, we’ve gone back and forth speculating on this issue. Guess we’ll know for sure once everything starts leasing.
Agreed, Scott. People who can afford this level of payment move to Dunwoody or elsewhere in North DeKalb,and don’t live in apartments with kids, by and large. There is no evidence to suggest otherwise. Felonious falsification of address is a separate issue, and is the responsibility of CSD to handle.
Scott – one can rent a 2 br condo in the city for $1100-$1500 month. So yes, this will be something to consider in the very near future. I know of one family in the Decatur Square condo complex that makes $150k annually and bought one of those condos because they couldn’t afford a home in the city, yet wanted their kids in the system. At that salary, the bank will loan you around $300k.
Do a search on Realtor.com and look at the minimum for a 3/2 in the city – for a single family home, they start at $400k and the prices are going up like bottle rockets.
I was responding to a comment specifically about new downtown apartments yet to come online. Condos are a different matter. They’ve been built for years so, if they were such an attractive workaround for families trying to get in the system, they’d be inundated with kids by now. But they’re not. At last check, each of our downtown condo projects, at most, had a relative handful of kids and that’s it, yet we’ve been testing the premise for a decade. If they weren’t a model where revenue exceeds impacts, it’d be known by now.
This is NOT to say that no families with kids are going to buy a downtown condo or rent a downtown apartment (some undoubtedly will), and I’m well aware of what real estate costs in COD. But we’ve got all kinds of both on-the-ground and broader market research indicating that these numbers will stay relatively modest. If we’re really concerned about more kids into the system, we should be identifying every empty-nest home in Decatur occupied by someone feeling the tax pinch and find a way to keep them in their home and prevent the house from turning over. Because that’s the product families with kids really want to be in.