When Is Full Full?

Predicting School Enrollment. What model is best? OR When is full really full?
One of my friends recently explained to me the seemingly inexplicable difference between our school capacity in 2002 (2100 students) and the recent PRA reports reduced capacity of 1874. This is based on an industry “90 percent standard” which is often called the “optimal standard.” OK, now we know that full is really full when it’s two entire grades short of being full. WHEN full is full seems to be the biggest question facing our district now.


Superintendent Carvin stated at the recent Planning Commission meeting that they typically see a three-year lag in school enrollment increases based on permit applications. The school district uses a statistic in their analyses called “Enrollment Increase per Building Permit”, but they use current year permit data for this statistic that seems to render it meaningless.

I ran a quick and dirty regression analysis of building permits versus the ratio of enrollment increase to building permits factoring in a three-year lag-time. This approach dampens the fluctuations in that statistic, shows moderate linearity (with the mere 4 points I had) and supports using the three year delay in predicting school enrollment. We can expect one more year of “boom” building permits (2004-119) followed by precipitous reductions in 2005 (90) and 2006 (49). 2007 looks to be substantially lower than those. Only 4 permits had been requested as of March 5. According to my source, typical permit requests by March in recent years fell in the 30 to 40 range. The charts and graphs extrapolating enrollment based on 5-year history do not appear to take this into account, growing merrily at a steady rate, predicting overcrowded schools by 2011 (using the 90% -is-full standard). This is a full ten years before our debt load on the high school is retired. Restraint should be the word of the day in approaching this issue at this time.