The more than 3,000 students who unexpectedly appeared in
Douglas County School District this school year represent an
aberration DCSD predicts will not be repeated.
In preliminary enrollment projections, the district is expecting
to grow by 2,200 to 2,300 students next school year, said DCSD
Director of Long Range Planning and Land Management Joe Wolf at a
Long Range Planning Committee meeting Feb. 1.
“Obviously this is not as big as last year’s increase and, as
we’ve told our principals, no reasonable model could have
predicated last year’s increase,” Wolf said.
These early projections have been given to DCSD principals to
evaluate and cross check with open enrollment data. After a second
and third round of cuts, the estimate will be finalized in
March.
For the 2005-2006 school year, enrollment was expected to
increase by about 2,000 students. However, the October 2005 count
showed more than 3,000 new students in Douglas County schools, the
largest single-year increase in the district’s history.
Surveys sent to new families in the district failed to reveal
reasons for the enrollment jump, Wolf said. However, he believes
turnover of existing housing, partially due to low interest rates,
could be the reason.
“We have anecdotal evidence of that, but we don’t have any
statistical evidence to collaborate that,” Wolf said. “We don’t
think it’s going to happen again, not to that degree.”
Even though the estimates for 2005 were off by 1,000 students,
in past years the planning department had been within 100 of the
actual count.
Since the 2005 enrollment leap is believed to be a anomaly and
it’s better to estimate lower rather than greater for budget
reasons, the district is not going to use the 3,000 new students as
a baseline to predict 2006 figures.
“As much as we were off last time, we were off to the good,”
said Tom Bell, DCSD director of planning. “It would have been worse
if we had predicted 3,100 and only had 2,000. You’re better off to
start low.”
Now that the committee’s recommendation for the 2006 list of
bond projects has been passed to the board of education, long range
planning will focus on the disbursement of information. The
committee voted 10-5 to recommend $226 million worth of projects
for the board of education to include in a possible bond
proposal.
“Upon conclusion of the recommendation to the board, mass
communication starts to involve long rang planning in getting the
word out,” said Patrick Hickey, DCSD assistant superintendent for
educational support services.
The board of education will discuss the project list in work
sessions leading up to the final wording of the bond question in
August. Hickey expects the board to focus its upcoming discussions
of the bond on the issue of capacity needs at high
schools.
Contact Joan Gandy at
jgandy@ccnewspapers.net.