Aerial view of Fort Collins with a population data texture overlaid

Using Data to Develop a Comprehensive Understanding of Student Enrollment Trends and Inform School Facility Planning

Client Name

Poudre School District

Related Sector

Poudre School District (PSD) is a large school district in northern Colorado with approximately 30,000 students and 56 schools. PSD sought to gain a better understanding of student enrollment trends in the district, including where students chose to attend school, what specialized programs they enrolled in, and the demographic characteristics of those students. PSD also wanted to determine the capacity of each of their elementary, middle, and high school buildings to determine whether changes should be made to their school boundaries to promote equitable access to school facilities while maximizing the use of those facilities. FLO worked closely with the PSD team to set the objectives and guiding principles for each of these tasks. 

  • School Capacity and Utilization Analysis: FLO worked with the PSD team to create three new definitions for school capacity and reviewed building plans and the use of each room of a building (e.g., classrooms, cafeterias, gyms) to determine the capacity of each school. Once capacities were determined, FLO provided PSD with data that showed which schools were over or under capacity based on current and forecasted enrollment.
  • School Choice Analysis: FLO reviewed student enrollment in each PSD school to determine which students were attending their zoned school and which students were attending a school of choice. The school choice analysis showed which neighborhood schools captured a large percentage of their zoned students, and which schools had high rates of students transferring out. 
  • Student Yield Analysis: The goal of this analysis was to help PSD gain a better understanding of how recent residential construction had influenced student generation rates (i.e., current students in new housing) throughout PSD. The analysis was conducted for each type of housing unit (e.g., cabins, manufactured homes, and condos) and for single- and multifamily subdivisions. The analysis also projected the number of students living in planned developments expected to enroll in PSD. 
  • School Programming Analysis: The goal of this task was to analyze PSD’s programs to compare student populations enrolled in programs to the student population as a whole. FLO completed a demographic analysis (comparing free- and reduced-lunch eligibility, gender, and race/ethnicity information) and a geographic analysis (comparing program student locations to the locations of the student population). 

PSD is using these analyses to inform their long-term facility planning and engage with the community about proposed changes to their school boundaries. These analyses are available on PSD’s website: https://www.psdschools.org/community/long-range-planning/data-reports 

"I appreciated the partnership with which I worked with FLO. It was more productive because of that feeling of partnership that permeated the work."
Brett Larsen, Poudre School District

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Kent Martin
Kent Martin
Director of Data Analytics, Senior Planner