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Trustees at the Pleasanton Unified School District heard and discussed forecasts for enrollment in district schools in the next six years last week in a report from demographers that incorporated the most recent data available.
“Every October we ask for a snapshot of your student data, we map the students … so we know where all of your current students live. We research the active and future development within your district, so we know what’s going on now and the future. We also look at other more recent demographic data within the last three to four years to capture current trends and roll that out into a seven year student forecast,” demographer David Kaitz, of Davis Demographics, said during the Feb. 24 board meeting.
Kaitz said that mapping the actual locations of students to get a sense of how many students are in each “attendance zone” was key to offering insight at a granular, local level, with districtwide numbers being used for comparison.
“This is a snapshot of where the parents are choosing to send their children,” Kaitz said.
“We focus on where the students live. We want to look at what’s going on in these areas where they live: Is it growing? Is it declining? Is it stable? That’s what we need to figure out,” he added.
Looking at data at the hyperlocal level, rather than district level, means better tracking the causes behind impacts such as transfers in and out, and seeing precisely where they are happening, Kaitz noted.
The projections additionally took into account data regarding mobility factors in looking at the future of district enrollment. These consisted of rates of housing resales, foreclosures, apartment migration and high school dropouts. Kaitz lauded the district’s numbers regarding the final factor, noting that it means the district is keeping most of its high school students in school.
Birth rates and forecasts are generally a major factor taken into play when predicting enrollment, Kaitz said, which the report he presented last week had done. However, he noted that PUSD stood out for yielding rates of kindergarten students that are much higher than birth rates alone might predict.
“One thing that’s really obvious, and this goes all the way back now to 2006 and beyond, is you have more kids attending kindergarten than were born in your area five years earlier,” Kaitz said. “This is unusual, but it just shows how desirable your schools are. Essentially you’ve been 41% above the average birth counts the past five years. So you’re getting kids coming in that were born there, and then some.”
Additionally, the projections presented Feb. 24 took into account the expansion of universal transitional kindergarten, as well as students anticipated to live in new housing planned for development in the next seven years.
“Over the next four years, all the districts in California are going to ramp up from three months of TK to a full grade in 2025 and beyond,” Kaitz said, noting that this was one factor that boded well for elementary school enrollment projections.
However, Kaitz noted that the impacts of new housing developments were especially difficult to predict accurately in this year’s report, given that much remains to be seen as the state’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) process unfolds locally. Kaitz said it wouldn’t be until next year that new developments spurred by RHNA would be far enough along to factor into projections, as would be the case with some other longer term developments that had yet to break ground.
One factor Kaitz said demographers were relatively certain about when it comes to new housing is that “transit-oriented” housing tends to produce lower student yields than other types of housing. This could potentially change future projections, depending on the amount of transit-oriented housing in the northern portion of the city compared to housing further away from transit hubs.
Enrollment, which has been on the decline at PUSD and districts throughout the state since the start of the pandemic, is expected to continue to trend downward in the coming school year. As of October, the district has 14,060 students, with a loss of 225 expected in the coming school year, before numbers level out at between 13,200 to 13,500 students by 2028.
Kaitz noted that while the overall downward trend was discouraging, numbers were expected to increase in future projections, especially for elementary and middle schools.
“They’re still not going to be reaching levels where they were just a few years ago, so keep that in mind, but they will continue to go up beyond our seven year window,” Kaitz said.
Trustee Joan Laursen noted that this would mean a major shift in the district’s approach, having been defined by a rapid growth in enrollment prior to a decline that started in the years prior to the pandemic.
“Our growth was so ingrained in our DNA. It was what we expected and were used to, and all the conversations were about ‘don’t take in district transfers because we’re over-enrolled and we’re crowded’ … And now we’re kind of having to adjust our thinking about this,” Laursen said.
Board President Mark Miller noted that other rapid changes, such as in demographics and housing prices, also led to some uncertainty about future needs and enrollment numbers in the district.
“For example, the demographics from an ethnic perspective have changed dramatically in this valley … what does that do to this, we don’t know,” Miller said. “The mobility situation is very interesting, and the cost of the housing prices here. So who can afford to come here? Is that going to change?”
While enrollment data from last fall showed the impact of more than a year and a half of unprecedented pandemic factors, Kaitz noted that, particularly going into a second year of the pandemic, it was probably better not to look at the data as an anomaly compared to prior years, given that COVID-19 is proving to be a longer-term issue than had first been anticipated.
