MCPS To Change Way It Predicts Enrollment Numbers

From Bethesda Now - By Aaron Kraut

MCPS officials and county planners next week will detail a new methodology they say predicts how new development affects school enrollment numbers.

In the past, the MCPS Division of Long Range Planning used the Planning Department’s 2008 Census Update Survey to calculate “student generation rates” across four types of housing and the elementary, middle and high school levels in each of the school system’s 25 high school clusters.

The generation rates serve as a predictor for how many students will come from a new development. The school system’s enrollment numbers have been rising since 2008, which is why Montgomery County officials have labeled the growth as a school capacity crisis in their push for more state funding.

If projected enrollment at any school level exceeds 105 percent of capacity, new residential development in the affected cluster will require school facility payments. If projected enrollment exceeds 120 percent of capacity, a moratorium is placed on new residential development.

At the June 12 Planning Board hearing, the Board will be presented with the FY2015 Annual School Test results. No school cluster exceeds the 120 percent capacity threshold, but 16 clusters have at least one level of school that exceeds 105 percent capacity. Five of those clusters have at least two school levels that exceed school facility payment threshold, including the middle school and high school portions of the Whitman High School cluster.

Last year, 18 school clusters required the payment of a school facility fee with seven school clusters

exceeding capacity at more than one school level.

MCPS enrollment forecasts have been highly accurate on a countywide scale. The total county one-year forecast is typically within one percent of actual enrollment. The six-year forecast — which drives school construction decisions in the six-year capital budget — is typically within one to two percent.

In their explanation for the new methodology, planners said predicting enrollment in individual school clusters is much more difficult.

To help address that, MCPS staff and planners changed things up. Instead of relying on the 2008 Census Update Survey, staff matched up a MCPS student address database with a file of property parcels from the Planning Department.

Officials matched up the data with actual properties, a process called geocoding. Of the 148,874 geocoded student addresses, only 2.13 percent couldn’t be matched to designated residential parcels.

To come up with the student generation rates, staff divided the number of students across each school level from high rise apartments, low and mid-rises apartments, townhomes built in the last 10 years and single family detached homes built in the last 10 years by the number of those units.

With Planning Board approval, officials hope to use those new numbers to judge how many students proposed development will generate.

By the new methodology, single family detached homes generate the highest number of students, with 700 students from every 1,000 single family detached units across all grade levels. A new high rise building would generate 60 new elementary school students per every 1,000 units, 25 new middle school students per every 1,000 units and 33 new high school students per every 1,000 units.

It’s important to remember those rates can vary based on where new development happens in the county.

In October 2012, MCPS Long Range planner Bruce Crispell did a survey of downtown Bethesda multi-family buildings in which he found 74 elementary school-aged children. He also found 43 middle school students and 54 high school students. That worked out to a ratio of 20 elementary students per 1,000 units, well below the 42 elementary students per 1,000 units that Crispell and MCPS used as the old student generation rate.