SR 06:090A - Laserfiche WebLink

ENROLLMENT PROJECTION CONSULTANTS Providing School Districts with Accurate Enrollment Forecasts by Location Area 32 Older Mobile Home Park 450 units, 90 K.8 students. 0.20 SGA Area 28 Recent Upper.lncome Det. Homes 21 B units, 85 K-8 students, 0.39 SGA Area 33 Recent Upscale Townhouses 82 units, 9 K.8 students, 0.11 SGR Superintendent and Board of Education Pleasanton Unified School District 4665 Bernal Avenue Pleasanton, CA 94566 Tuesday, January 24, 2006 Dear Superintendent and Board Members: This "letter format" report presents the findings In our latest enrollment forecast study. The section directly below provides some background information. Subsequent sections follow the order of the tables, starting with the projected enrollments in Tables 1 and 2 and then some of the underlying factors to those forecast numbers in Tables 3 through 6. The appendices provide additional detail for those who want to delve further into the data. This document has the same structure and even some of the same content as our last report to make a point: that the general outlook is unchanged. The enrollment will start to decline in the next decade. There is still a question of exactly when, but not if. The current total may be slightly larger than we had projected (by 78, or one-half of 1 %), but that was due mainly to more students in apartments. That category commonly has fluctuating student populations, with ups-and-downs that rarely translate into lasting trends. Also raising this year's enrollment was a higher-than-expected gain from recently built housing. As you will read in this report, however, new detached-home construction will not be as great an enrollment contributor after 2008. Pleasanton is approaching near-build-out of such residences. We actually have lowered the projected total based on the latest data from the city. The student populations in the traditional single-famlly-detached-home neighborhoods, by contrast, were projected almost perfectly, and that was for an aging population. This trend should be ongoing, creating a probable decline in the elementary grades and potentially in all levels by 2015. Backaround This is the sixth consecutive year that I have provided an in-depth, neighborhood-specific enrollment forecast for Pleasanton Unified School District (district). My firm specializes in these detailed studies, where every major component of the enrollment trends is determined, analyzed, compared to the knowledge gained from nearly 200 previous studies, and then projected. To do this, I drove literally every street in the district in our first Pleasanton study to learn the community and divide it into suitable planning areas. These areas represent a single dominant housing type wherever feasible, including by subjective price ranges and average home and parcel sizes. The extent to which the trends are similar throughout these housing categories often indicates a greater likelihood for those trends to continue to at least some degree. By contrast, large enrollment shifts in only a few locations, such as the aforementioned apartments, usually have a far lower probability to extend into the future. 3 West 37'" Avenue, Suite 7, San Mateo, CA 94403-4470 . Fax: (650) 345-9766 . Phone: (650) 345-9765