The Business Case for K-12 Boundary Realignment
Depending on building operational needs and the district’s enrollment trends, K-12 districts often need a boundary realignment. Boundary changes should occur in areas that have experienced a shift in population or a shift in demographics within the population. Older neighborhoods begin to have more “empty nesters”. Other areas of the district may have vacant land that has begun to be built out. Some new construction areas might have more affordable housing ripe for families, whereas other new housing might be more suited for an older, less family-intensive group of homeowners.
Facility Planning
Understanding the details of student enrollment and the data that impacts the enrollment is critical to Facility Planning. Facility Planning must look at the story the data tells us:
Conditions – has the campus lived its useful life, and is it now cost-prohibitive to keep it open?
Adequacy – is each campus able to reach teaching and learning goals within its current state?
Capacity & Utilization – is each campus maintaining a balance of class size and maximizing the use of the campus?
Programs – are there program changes affecting the functional capacity?
If a campus or campuses can’t effectively support the educational delivery model, then the district must review the demographics, feeder patterns and program profiles and boundaries.
Boundary Realignment Solutions
We have seen districts add classroom wings to campuses for short-term solutions. These short-term solutions, however, create long-term impacts such as overcrowding cafeterias and too many lunch periods, packed hallways, insufficient parking lots and dismissal challenges, and unavailable gym space, in addition to hardships on staff and the increase in the facility’s operational maintenance costs.
Understanding your district’s enrollment and trends is critical to the overall boundary re-alignment analysis. Tracking students as a group or “cohort” over time enables a district to measure changes in student enrollment by grade. These observed trends will typically align with the other data sets, such as live births and macro-level social demographic trends. One common trend is the seemingly counterintuitive declining enrollments, even as your city or county is growing in population. Knowing the enrollment projections supports the facility planning at all campuses in addition to teacher staffing and operational needs.
As programs and enrollments change, a closer review of feeder patterns should be completed. Transportation and operational costs may have increased due to population shifts. Conditions, adequacy, and utilizations also support the efforts to alleviate overcrowding and assist you with balanced enrollment. Accommodations for new programs and learning opportunities will continue to be updated. This establishes the balance between all data sets and may lead your district to a much-needed boundary realignment.
