Student Enrollment Forecasting and Boundary Analysis Support Long-Term Facility Planning

The School District of Philadelphia (SDP), serving the children of the City of Philadelphia, is the eighth-largest school district in the country. The SDP’s portfolio of buildings is impressive; it directly operates 217 schools, including 177 neighborhood schools, 20 special admission schools, 12 citywide admission schools, and eight other schools. The SDP also includes 87 charter schools that are independently operated, 21 of which are Renaissance Charter Schools. The 177 SDP-run neighborhood schools and 21 Renaissance Charter Schools each have school attendance areas that determine attendance eligibility based on students’ neighborhoods.

SDP has experienced changes in enrollment across the city, which has created an unbalanced student population and inefficient facility use. Although the number of students in Philadelphia attending publicly funded schools has remained relatively constant over the last five years, there has been a small but consistent shift of students from the district-run and Renaissance Charter Schools to other charter schools (including cyber charter schools), nonpublic schools, and homeschools. Some schools are underenrolled, because a significant number of parents choose to send their students to a school outside their school attendance area, and others exceed their facility capacity.

To overcome the current uncertainty of future enrollment—partly caused by decreasing rates of in-migration to the city (exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic) and partly by declining birth rates—the SDP began working with FLO and the public engagement firm Bloom Planning in 2019 to create a plan to:

• Optimize the utilization of buildings to ensure that students have access to a high-quality school close to where they live
• Invest limited capital dollars where they are needed most
• Create thoughtful transitions for students at elementary and middle grades
• Maximize the use of municipal and SDP buildings

The project was paused in 2020 because of the pandemic, and it resumed in 2022. The pause allowed the SDP to reevaluate the original project and focus on a citywide approach rather than just on certain regions within the district boundary.

When the project resumed in March 2022, FLO led demographic and geographic analyses and developed the 2022–23 through 2031–32 student enrollment forecasts. The forecasts provided analyses of historical and current student enrollment patterns; historical and projected population and housing dynamics in the City of Philadelphia; and the potential impacts of the pandemic on enrollment. Close collaboration with the Philadelphia City Planning Commission allowed us to capture and incorporate local knowledge and expertise. The forecasts were used for a detailed review of facilities and future enrollment.

After this review, FLO worked with the SDP team to determine how best to analyze and graphically display forecast data to help SDP begin planning for enrollment balancing. FLO created a presentation that showed the forecasted enrollment for selected schools in graph form, along with transfer rates from and into other SDP schools. FLO also assisted the SDP team with an analysis of potential scenarios for balancing enrollment between schools, adding several more options to the initial list of scenarios. The SDP is using the enrollment forecasts and scenarios to inform the development of a new Master Facilities Plan.