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ENROLLMENT PROJECTION CONSULTANTS Providing School Districts with Accurate Enrollment Forecasts by Location Area 32 Older Mobile Home Park 450 unts, 90 K-8 students, 0.20 SGR Area 28 Recent Upper-Income Det. Homes 218 units, 85 K-8 students, 0.39 SGR 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 Dear Superintendent and Board Members: Area 34 Recent Middle-Income Det. Homes 94 units, 33 K-8 students, 0.35 SGR Area 35 Older Middle-Income Det. Homes 89 units, 57 K-8 students, 0.64 SGR nw r.~r•~r.~ Elementary and Middle School Attendance Boundaries F ®~ Friday, December 28, 2007 srq~°,~ ryg q~T ~,~~ ~~TR ~r~~/L'T ~~j This is the concluding documentation to our latest enrollment forecast study. (We are using this simplified letter format per our contract.) The section below provides some background information and is followed by a brief economic discussion. 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 numbers in Tables 3 to 7. The appendices provide more detail for those readers who want to delve further into the data. Background This is the eighth year that I have provided aneighborhood-specific forecast for the Pleasanton Unified School District (district). My firm specializes in these detailed studies, where every major component of the recent enrollment trends is determined, analyzed, compared to our knowledge gained from over 200 previous studies, and then projected. To do this, we drove literally every street 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. We have found that even subtle differences in residential type and value can generate divergent enrollment trends in some districts. Those areas have been further refined in subsequent studies for your district, especially in the latest new housing locations. While our four preceding projections were each within one-half of 1% of the actual total in the following October, last year's forecast for fall 2007 is low by more than 1 %, which is mainly due to three sources.' The most significant source is the variance in kindergarten, where there are 71 more students than we projected. This is always the most difficult class to project because, unlike in any other grade, virtually none of those students were enrolled a year ago. Whenever a forecast is provided in the fall or winter for the following school year, regardless of who is generating that projection, a district should always review the kindergarten registrations in spring and adjust the kindergarten expectations accordingly. A single year of a much larger or smaller kindergarten, however, does not automatically alter the forecast for the following years in the same manner; sometimes those differences are single-grade nuances that have little to do with the other trends. A second contributing source to the higher-than-projected enrollment is incoming inter-district enrollment, which is more of a district choice than a demographic The actual enrollment totals being compared to are from the student files provided to EPC by the district. 3 West 37~' Avenue, Suite 7, San Mateo, CA 94403-4470 Fax: (650) 345-9766 Phone: (650) 345-9765