School District Planning and Projections Success: Best Practices for Using Enrollment Data and Analytics

Across every grade, student enrollment is projected to decline over the next several years, according to the NCES 2022 National Digest of Education Statistics. In the worst case, third- and fourth-grade enrollment may decrease by over 10% from 2022-2030.

In large metro and suburban districts, chronic absenteeism rates are at crisis levels. According to the IES School Pulse Panel study of the 2022-23 school year, 46% of Los Angeles Unified School District students and 40% of New York City Public Schools’ students are chronically absent. That means that within those two districts, 575,000 students are missing 15 days of school, or three full weeks, during a standard 185-day school year calendar.

Using data can help you plan for changes in school enrollment—and the effects those changes bring. With access to comprehensive enrollment data and analytics, you can better understand enrollment trends and the geographic context of your student data.

Here’s Why It’s Important to Have Comprehensive Enrollment Data and Analytics

Enrollment data and analytics provide actionable intelligence about your district’s student enrollment through student information, descriptive and predictive statistics, and analytic tools. This collective picture helps to predict student enrollment better and adequately allocate resources in your district.

By leveraging past, present, and projected future student enrollment, including district-wide and grade-level projections, you can better view enrollment forecasts. That critical information—combined with housing development information, boundary consultations, school capacity, and student yield studies—can give you insights when you move school boundaries in multiple scenarios into things like:

• Staffing needs
• Facility adjustments
• Professional development
• Transportation impacts

Going back to address declining enrollment and chronic absenteeism, enrollment data and analytics can help improve attendance by monitoring and analyzing attendance data, identifying trends, and providing actionable insights to help attendance teams communicate with students and families. Data can also help inform attendance notifications, nudges, and letters.

Simulated enrollment scenarios based on real-world analytics can provide school boards with real-time impact estimations. With a difficult decision like closing a school, transparency and accuracy are critical when communicating with parents and the community.

“Having a sound outreach plan in place was really important. It was key for us to inform the public of the actual impact by showing the data and ensuring them that we were prepared,” says Alvaro Meza, Gilroy Unified School District’s Chief Business Officer, about the process his district went through in closing an elementary school. The district relied on PowerSchool Predictive Enrollment Analytics to look at multiple data points and projections. “We could show our 10-year projection with school capacities and how we’d be able to accommodate students into the future.”

Meza says having excellent data tools to visualize the new boundaries and maps helped people understand it more rapidly. Using Predictive Enrollment Analytics, the district could show the community crucial data like current and historical enrollment, birth rates, and student generation rates.

Data also helps with long-term planning. When you have inaccurate enrollment projections, you can end up facing a host of problems—like incorrect staffing levels and delays or cancellations of construction projects or programs that provide extra support to students. But accurate enrollment projections from a predictive enrollment analytics tool can help improve funding and budgeting with accurate, comprehensive forecasts to stay ahead in gaining funding and determining finances.

5 Best Practices and Recommendations for Enrollment Projections

1) Make forecasting enrollment a standardized, annual process

During the annual forecasting process, you can plan better by viewing past, present, and projected future student enrollment. Enrollment forecasting should combine housing development data, boundary consultations, school capacity, and student yield studies.

Before using Predictive Enrollment Analytics, Gilroy Unified School District struggled with a complicated, time-consuming process to see which students were assigned to specific boundaries that would give them insights and mapping estimates.

“Everything took people and time. We didn’t have the expertise to do that at a very rapid pace— to give our board and superintendent data that they needed to make almost real-time decisions,” says Meza.

2) Invest in technology and analytics that can test the viability of enrollment policies

For Gilroy, they “specifically looked for an enrollment analytics tool with a host of options that was dynamic and responsive enough for our needs,” says Meza. “We also wanted a smart, thoughtful, strategic partner. This was for the long haul, and we wanted a good partner we could rely on.”

3) Ensure easy access to open enrollment and enrollment forecast data

Predictive Enrollment Analytics can bring your total enrollment picture into focus with a unique forecasting model that’s inclusive of open enrollment, inter- and intra-district transfers, out-of-district enrollment, and permit trends. PowerSchool generates both district-wide and grade-level enrollment projections so you can identify trends and changes and also adjust your forecasts quickly.

“The Predictive Enrollment Analytics tool gives us the ability to organize and analyze data in whole new ways. Instead of finding trends in graphs or charts, we are discovering them visually in maps of our neighborhoods,” says Joel Rabin, Former Assistant Superintendent​ of Natomas Unified School District, CA​.

4) Adopt ideal school size ranges for elementary, middle, and high school

Accurate enrollment forecasting lets you plan appropriate classroom and staff needs for all of your district’s schools. It also helps you track and understand which school sites have either little or excess capacity.

Teton County School District 1 uses PowerSchool Enrollment to ensure accurate student data, which helps them better predict their upcoming needs. If they need more ESL teachers, special programs accommodations, or bus drivers—as examples—PowerSchool gives them the student data they need to prepare.

“Our administrators can make better decisions as far as student needs, staffing needs, just forecasting from an overall budgetary standpoint. Also, looking at just planning for professional development as far as different grade levels, we can see the anticipated enrollment of our kindergarteners. We can plan in advance for things like bus routes, health files, any screening, and things we need to do for students,” says Kim Byrne, PowerSchool Administrator​, Teton County School District 1, WY​.

Predictive Enrollment Analytics can also help you with your special programs planning. Ensure you have the space, staff, and facility requirements necessary to support your special programs population.

5) Invest in a long-term forecasting tool with real-time results

Predictive Enrollment Analytics offers two 10-year forecasts to gain better views into your long-term trends. Our first forecast (moderate to high-end) generates more students and helps with things like facilities planning or ensuring appropriate housing for students.

The second forecast (conservative to low-end) generates fewer students to err on the side of excess capacity for more accurate budgeting and staff planning. These enrollment forecasts include historical patterns of open enrollment within the district and enrollment from outside the district.

“Predictive Enrollment Analytics allows us to have, within a reasonable doubt, a very good prediction of what school will be like ten years from now. We can place schools on an imaginary map so we can have an idea of if we were to put a school in this area, what would be the likelihood that it will fill up the way we want it to,” says Tim Ivey, Chief Technology and Facilities Officer, Iredell Statesville Schools, NC.

For staffing, by-school and by-grade projections give you visibility to where more or fewer teachers will be required for any year in the 10-year future.

Moving Ahead with Data

The work toward addressing enrollment decline, chronically absent students, and school facility needs isn’t done once you get enrollment data. It’s essential to start the process with surveys and polls, and base changes and improvements on facility improvements and better study outcomes.

It takes time to work with the impacted populations to change perceptions. To gain the best results from an enrollment analytics tool:

• Continue with regular forecasting and long-term and long-range planning
• Develop a culture of proactive enrollment engagement
• Identify geographic areas of your district that are not serving a high proportion of school-age students

Remember that enrollment analytics helps visualize and analyze the relationship between students, schools, capacities, boundaries, community demographics, and enrollment trends—leading to better, informed decisions.