Back in July, I did a 'deep dive' into enrollment numbers for the district. I wanted to provide an update to that post. If you didn't read the original post, you may want to click that link above, as I will not be going into as much detail on this one, but I will revisit each of the topics from that post.
(The blue numbers in the charts are new.)
Elementary school enrollment is down from the end of last year, and down 20% from the high in Spring 2003. The 5th grade class last year was one of the largest classes in the elementary schools and they have aged out. Beeler is the only school that has a higher enrollment. Unfortunately Beeler is also the school that is closest to its capacity.
District wide, enrollment is down slightly from a year ago.
Grade 2 went up an average of one child per class, grade 3 went down a little over one child per class. The other grades were relatively unchanged.
In June 2016, DeMasi had the highest average of children per classroom. In June 2017, it was Marlton. In June 2018, it was Rice. This year, it is Jaggard. It would appear that the fluctuations are just the normal ebb and flow of children by grade in each neighborhood.
Analysis
As expected, the incoming class of 1st graders was far less than the outgoing class of 5th graders (386 vs 484). This continues and even accelerates the downward trend of previous years - last year in September 2017, the 1st Grade class had 406 students, which was the lowest of the 5 primary grades.
However, the other primary grades actually increased enrollment over this past summer. For example, rising second graders (the class of 2029) went from 404 in June to 420 in September, rising 3rd graders went from 415 to 420, etc. In addition, part time and full time Kindergarten enrollment both increased more than 10% . This could be due to a variety of factors: increased children in the district, increased offering of paid tuition Kindergarten, the reputation of the educational offerings, or some other reason. So while the incoming 1st grade class was 98 children less than the outgoing 5th grade class, overall elementary school standard education enrollment only went down 16 children from June 2018.
The only other item of note is that Beeler is the only school that actually has an increase in children. This appears to be due to the uneven new development in town. In an ideal situation, new neighborhoods would be spread evenly throughout town, so the new students would be spread out among the 6 schools. However, much of the new development in town has been concentrated off of Sharp Road, near the Medford border. Since the older neighborhoods on Sharp were sent to Beeler, there were already Beeler buses in the area, so the new neighborhoods were sent to Beeler as well. There are still additional neighborhoods being completed in the area (Winding Brook and Barclay Chase) which may compound the problem.
Previous Blog Posts
(The blue numbers in the charts are new.)
In June 2016, DeMasi had the highest average of children per classroom. In June 2017, it was Marlton. In June 2018, it was Rice. This year, it is Jaggard. It would appear that the fluctuations are just the normal ebb and flow of children by grade in each neighborhood.
Analysis
As expected, the incoming class of 1st graders was far less than the outgoing class of 5th graders (386 vs 484). This continues and even accelerates the downward trend of previous years - last year in September 2017, the 1st Grade class had 406 students, which was the lowest of the 5 primary grades.
However, the other primary grades actually increased enrollment over this past summer. For example, rising second graders (the class of 2029) went from 404 in June to 420 in September, rising 3rd graders went from 415 to 420, etc. In addition, part time and full time Kindergarten enrollment both increased more than 10% . This could be due to a variety of factors: increased children in the district, increased offering of paid tuition Kindergarten, the reputation of the educational offerings, or some other reason. So while the incoming 1st grade class was 98 children less than the outgoing 5th grade class, overall elementary school standard education enrollment only went down 16 children from June 2018.
The only other item of note is that Beeler is the only school that actually has an increase in children. This appears to be due to the uneven new development in town. In an ideal situation, new neighborhoods would be spread evenly throughout town, so the new students would be spread out among the 6 schools. However, much of the new development in town has been concentrated off of Sharp Road, near the Medford border. Since the older neighborhoods on Sharp were sent to Beeler, there were already Beeler buses in the area, so the new neighborhoods were sent to Beeler as well. There are still additional neighborhoods being completed in the area (Winding Brook and Barclay Chase) which may compound the problem.
Previous Blog Posts