Enrollment Forecasts for Facilities Planning and Well-Resourced Schools

Seattle Public Schools (SPS) must update its long-range facility plan every six years. The plan provides a framework for capital levy planning, as required by the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI). One of the pillars of the plan is student enrollment projections for the district’s 105 schools and programs. 

FLO successfully completed 10-year forecasts during the 2022–23 school year, and SPS engaged FLO again during the 2023–24 school year to update forecasts through 2033–34, using school enrollment data from October 2023 and the latest birth data from the Washington State Department of Health.

Student enrollment projections in a time of declining student populations is tricky. Like many districts, SPS suffered significant enrollment losses in 2020 when classes were remote during the pandemic. However, when full-time in-person instruction resumed in the 2021–22 school year, the year-over-year K–12 enrollment loss was even greater. Smaller losses in each of the following two years resulted in an enrollment decline of 4,400 students between 2019–20 and 2023–24. The annual number of births each year to SPS residents has fallen each year since 2015, and the ratio of SPS kindergarten enrollment to births five years earlier has remained significantly lower than before the pandemic. These factors contributed to FLO’s forecasts of continued enrollment losses amounting to about 3,100 fewer K–12 students in 2028–29 than in 2023–24, including a loss of nearly 1,200 K–5 students over the same five-year span.

After preparing district-wide forecasts, FLO prepared forecasts of the number of SPS students residing in each of the district’s 58 elementary, 12 middle, and 10 high school attendance areas and the number of students attending each of the district’s schools and programs. Despite the district-wide decline, some areas and schools were expected to gain students due to new housing developments under construction, planned, or proposed at the time forecasts were prepared. The average number of students per new housing unit was particularly interesting to SPS, so FLO calculated student generation rates by housing type, affordability, and region for the more than 50,000 housing units built in the district between 2017 and 2022. Enrollment trends, forecasts, and student generation analyses were included in a March 2024 report provided to the district.

Like many districts, declining enrollment created very real budget challenges. FLO’s forecast provided SPS with the information it needed to build a budget for 2025. Since the district’s elementary schools were already under-enrolled and FLO’s forecasts anticipated growth at only a few schools, FLO’s projections suggested the district would need to consolidate schools in 2025 to balance their budget and maximize resources in order to best serve students during a time of district budget shortfall. These projections were also used to adapt SPS’s efforts to develop a system of Well-Resourced Schools where every student has access to the academic, social, and emotional support they need. With a focus on elementary grades, where SPS operates more than 70 schools, including 29 that had fewer than 300 students in the 2023–24 school year, projections revealed that SPS would need fewer school buildings to serve students in preschool through 5th grade where building capacity would be better aligned with student enrollment and priorities as expressed by families. For more information, see the “Well-Resourced Schools at Seattle Public Schools" document posted on: https://www.seattleschools.org/resources/well-resourced-schools/