Schools

What Do New Enrollment Projections Mean for the Iowa City School District?

That is still up for debate.


The Iowa City School Board has received new projected student enrollment numbers. What will determine planning next is how the board members interpret these projections.

Why is this important?

Because with limited School Infrastructure Local Option sales taxes available to build new buildings, how the school board members interpret these numbers could affect decision making for whether to build a fourth high school or two needed new elementary school buildings in the district. Or both.

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The Forecast Calls for Growth

On Tuesday night, Geoffrey Smith with the University of Iowa Geography Department presented the Iowa City School Board members with new student enrollment projections for the Iowa City School District. (The slide presentation is attached in PDF form to this article)

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His conclusion: the district is still projected to grow at a steady clip.

"Expect to have an increase of 200 to 300 students each year over each of the next four years," Smith told the board.

He projects that the district, with 12,047 students this year, will grow to 12,268 students by next school year.

Smith said he used various measures to develop his projections, such as: enrollment trends over the past four years, birth rates from 2010 census data, current attendance areas, and the natural slow erosion of enrollment over time for the current kindergarten class as it moves through the different buildings.

Smith also noted that there appears to be heavy growth in the North Liberty/North Corridor area at the elementary level, and steady growth that will eventually lead to capacity problems at the elementary level on the east side of Iowa City. Parents at crowded Penn Elementary School in North Liberty and on the east side of Iowa City, where elementary school capacity is running out, have recently argued the need for increased building space in their areas.

So what's so controversial about projections like that?

Two Sets of Numbers

Here's where things get a little overly complicated.

According to Assistant Superintendent Ann Feldmann, the state requires the school district, for the first time this year and from here on out, to certify its enrollment each fall without including special education students or students who have open enrolled into the district into the total. These other students, she said, are included in the enrollment report to the state but are not considered part of the district's certified enrollment number.

Coincidentally, Feldmann said this measure of students is similar to what the district had used up until this year for discussions such as class size or enrollment projections. She said what they used to use as a measure is called "regular ed students," which includes the general student body plus Level 1 special education students.

After last fall's , and other instances of confusion where the board was unclear about how many students were in the district, Feldmann said the board directed to the administration to provide "one enrollment number that we can all agree on." This number, now dubbed "Attending Students," was the measure Smith included in his report, adding open enrollment students and all special ed students to the final total.

By the nature of how attending students is tabulated, it is bound to be a higher enrollment figure than the certified enrollment or regular ed student figures.

The Trigger Points, Wherein I Finally Get to the Point

After the 2010 redistricting discussions, the sitting board at the time decided that the district should build a fourth high school in the North Liberty area at the prerogative of a future board, but only after all capacity had been used up in the district and certain trigger points had been met.

There were two main trigger points for the district to start planning to build this school: when the current sixth grade enrollment hits between 900 to 925 students and when the total high school enrollment is projected to exceed 3,750 students three years before the school would be built. 3,750 being roughly the current maximum capacity of the district's high schools.

According to Smith's attending students projections, the district has exceeded the first trigger with 908 sixth grades this year and 975 students next school year. The high school enrollment would be projected to break 3,750 by 2015, or three years after next school year.

Feldmann said that with regular ed numbers the school district would still hit these triggers, but just a few years later.

"We're either really, really close (to hitting the triggers) or we're just very close," Feldmann said.

However, since the previous board made its decision in 2010, the question has been raised concerning what projections the board was using to set the triggers. Was it the regular ed projections that they had used for projections up to that time, or a total attendance figure that would resemble the newly minted attendance students measure?

Board member Jeff McGinness said that the board should untangle this question.

"Should we use the new numbers presented by Geoffrey or the numbers that were considered by the board when they made that decision?" McGinness said.

Board member Patti Fields, who was on the previous board that made the decision, agreed this needs to be clarified.

"Now that we're looking at class size in a different way, I think we need a reassessment," Fields said.

But as this item was not on the agenda, it could come to no conclusion Tuesday night. The board members instead decided to discuss the matter further at a future facilities meeting.


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