School Facility Utilization Assessment and Boundary Recommendations for Enrollment Balancing

Harford County Public Schools has the eighth-largest student enrollment of the 24 public school systems in Maryland, with approximately 37,000 students at 55 schools. It covers a mostly suburban area northeast of Baltimore. At the time of the project, HCPS also had three major capital projects planned for upcoming years. Due to rising student enrollment and special education program enrollment, several schools in HCPS were at or over capacity. To help HCPS balance enrollment, FLO assisted the district with boundary reviews and modeling, program analyses, and enrollment balanced recommendations for all elementary, middle, and high schools.

FLO conducted a district-wide study that provided a comprehensive review of county enrollment forecasts, facility capacities, residential development trends, and long-term needs, including a scope study for a new elementary school, siting selection for another school, special programs, and an evaluation of the drivers of district-wide enrollment balancing. 

We worked closely with district staff to review and assess all data used in our boundary scenario modeling application, including understanding HCPS’s enrollment forecast data, and coordinated with program staff to determine the ideal program classroom placements at each school. We interviewed several municipal and county planners to determine near- and long-term potential residential developments in the county and used this information to allocate forecasted students to those areas.

In partnership with a community engagement subconsultant Bloom Planning, FLO led the public engagement efforts during advisory team meetings and online community open houses in the spring of 2021. This process included facilitating virtual advisory team meetings and breakout sessions, making updates to proposed school attendance area boundaries during and between meetings, generating updated statistics, and documenting and preparing materials that were publicly available on the project website. We were able to engage hundreds of community members in virtual meetings and use interactive dashboards to provide transparent and easy-to-understand data and information for decision-making.

The advisory team presented a final school boundary recommendation to the superintendent in June 2021 and FLO held subsequent meetings with the superintendent to provide data support for additions and changes to the advisory team recommendation. This included an additional analysis of a proposed boundary for a new elementary school in the heart of the county. In the fall of 2021, the superintendent held a series of community meetings to socialize the proposed boundary changes and continued to receive feedback on the boundary recommendation. The HCPS School Board approved the superintendent’s recommendation in February 2022.