NEW ROCHELLE, NY — A series of demographer studies contracted for by the City School District of New Rochelle and City of New Rochelle since 2015 indicate a significant decline in public school enrollment out to 2030 and beyond.
The decline, as far as the eye can see, has startling implications for state and federal funding, local property taxes and staffing headcount throughout the district. If unaddressed, the projections indicate a collapse in revenue from state and federal revenue, increasing costs and skyrocketing local property taxes to make up the shortfall.
The demographer studies were originally ordered up to better understand the impact of downtown real estate development on the public school system. The updates show that while student enrollment from the new buildings will add to student enrollment, broader trends dwarf the figures.
In November 2013, the New Rochelle City Council voted 6-1 to terminate a Memorandum of Understanding with Forest City/Ratner for development of waterfront property along Echo Bay. While the council vote ended that particular controversy, the concerns raised in the Echo Bay debate about tax abatements for developers, PILOTs or properties and the impact of new developments on the public school system remained.
PILOT is Payment in Lieu of Taxes, an alternative annual flat-fee property tax structure.
In 2015, both the City of New Rochelle and the City School District of New Rochelle undertook studies to project student enrollment out over time. The focus was on “Natural Growth” v. “Growth from Development”.
The City hired WXY Consulting to project the impact of downtown development on schools directly impacted by the anticipated development of the downtown area. WXY created PUMS (Public Use Microdata Sample), a census-based multiplier to project student yield on approved and planned developments in the downtown area. The PUMS multiplier was “carefully customized to the New Rochelle development context,” according to WXY.
WXY used Excel to make a straight-line 10 year enrollment projection model by carrying forward observed attrition and participation rates between 2010-2011 and 2014-2015, by school zone and grade, to produce moderate, high, and low baseline enrollment projections.
In other words, WXY did not use a sophisticated approach.
In terms of evaluating the impact on new development on the school district, the WXY projections using PUMS and New Rochelle Observed data calculated by the District were similar when the actual mix of housing units for the development (studios, 1BR, 2BR, 3BR) were held constant. WXY concluded that schools such as Trinity Elementary School, Isaac E. Young Middle School and New Rochelle High School would face significant capacity issues in the next decade, compounded by new development. Recommendations included expansion at New Rochelle High School or new high school construction.
WXY Demographer Report New Rochelle 2015
WXY Demographer FINAL Report New Rochelle 2015
WXYPP RDRXR Recommended Action Plan 10-6-15
The City School District of New Rochelle hired Western Suffolk BOCES to project student enrollment more broadly. School enrollment is impacted by birth-rate, migration (families moving in and out of a district), and the number of children attending non-public or charter schools. Downtown development is a small part of a bigger picture, from the school district’s perspective.
Western Suffolk BOCES, Office of School Planning and Research provides services statewide to districts to plan for the future with demographic, enrollment, and facilities studies. These services include analysis of demographic trends within a district, enrollment projections, an analysis of the current utilization of facilities and an exploration of future organizational alternatives.
Western Suffolk BOCES uses the Cohort Survival Model to project the district’s enrollment patterns out ten years into the future. The three basic inputs are: (1) actual enrollment by grade and school over the period ten years; (2) grade-to-grade retention (migration) ratios for each two-grade transition to grades 1-12 for the past ten years for the district and each school; (3) projected kindergarten entering cohorts based on the number of live births in Westchester County and the City of New Rochelle, five years before each year projected.
The Cohort Survival Model takes into consideration the normal community processes that affect school enrollment: (1) the number of births and fertility rates; (2) normal in and out migration; (3) transfers to and from non-public and charter schools; (4) population variations; and (5) resident family characteristics.
While migration in and out of a school district or between grades can be impacted by immigration, legal or not, the term migration here refers to people moving into or out of a school district regardless of their residency status or students moving between lower grades to upper grades and has nothing to do with the immigration issue writ large.
In other words, Western Suffolk BOCES did use a sophisticated approach.
What the Cohort Survival Model does not consider is what we will call Perception of Quality, a subjective variable dependent on soft information such as the willingness of parents to move into a school district based on their perception of the quality of education available in the schools their child will attend, the racial and ethnic mix of the school their child will attend, the safety of the school their child will attend or the willingness of parents already in the school district to keep their children in the public school system, especially those transitioning from middle school to high school. We will have more on that in a future article.
When we use the term “parents”, it describes the person or persons making decisions for a youngster whether they be a parent, guardian, or the government.
The Western Suffolk BOCES enrollment projections for New Rochelle were predicated on three assumptions: (1) population will continue to grow as new residential development attracts new residents to the community and the turnover of approximately 320 – 520 homes each year would continue; (2) future kindergarten classes will be maintained at a level close to those seen during the historical period, relative to housing turnover and changes in population; (3) non-public schools will continue to enroll approximately 13% to 15% of district resident students.
As of the 2015 Western Suffolk BOCES study, district enrollment had increased by 500 students, or 4.8 percent, in the past decade, since 2005. The study projected those gains to continue through 2019, when the projection period peak enrollment of 10,996 students was expected, 179 more students than were then enrolled, then decrease slightly over the remaining six years.
Western Suffolk BOCES provided updates to the district for the 2015 study in all the following years until last month except for the 2018-19 school year. Before 2015, Western Suffolk BOCES prepared a Long Range Planning Report for the District in the 2006 – 2007 school year which we will not include in our analysis for now.
2006-2007 Long Range Planning Study
2015 Long Range Planning Study
No Update for 2018-2019
Using the data obtained from the enrollment projection reports along with data from the City School District of New Rochelle and the New York State Department of Education, Talk of the Sound is undertaking a series of detailed studies of the future enrollment of schools in New Rochelle:
- K-12 Projections in 2015 to 2021 v. Actuals, out to 2030
- Impact on Downtown Development on Schools Directly Impacted
- Race and Ethnicity
- Economically Disadvantaged Pupils
- Non-Public School Enrollment
- Migration Between Grades
- Impact of COVID-19 on Future Enrollment
We begin with the K-12 projections contained in the Long Range Planning Documents from 2015 to 2021, here presented in what we call “the waterfall chart”.
To put the waterfall chart in context, imagine you are flying from New Rochelle, NY due east on a straight and steady course. You would end up in Portugal.
Now imagine you are off by 4% each hour of flight, or 3.6 degrees. After two hours of flying your trajectory would be to Casablanca, Morocco. After 4 hours, your destination would be Western Sahara. At the time you would be expecting to arrive in Portugal you would be hundreds of miles off course, over the coast of Southwest Africa.
Western Suffolk BOCES states their overall enrollment projections generally fall within a 4 percent margin of error. In the reports they present the accuracy of their projections by comparing the previous year’s projection with the current year’s actual. It is not much of an achievement to appear to predict accurately from one year to the next; how about over time?
That annual 4% margin of error compounds over time so that over a decade, the length of the projections by Western Suffolk BOCES, the cumulative error is 50%, out twenty years the cumulative error is 119%.
Now, consider the 2015 Western Suffolk BOCES Baseline Report.
The report says the overall district (K — 12) enrollment is expected to be at its peak in 2019, with 10,996 students; this represents a gain of 179 students, when compared to the then-current 2015 enrollment of 10,817.
In the 2016-2017 Update the overall district (K — 12) enrollment is expected to be at its peak in 2019, with 10,709 students; this represents a gain of 98 students, when compared to the then-current 2016 enrollment of 10,611.
The 2019 peak has been quietly adjusted down 257 students from 10,996 projected in 2015 report to 10,709 projected in 2016-17 report.
In the 2017-18 update, the overall district (K — 12) enrollment is expected to be at its peak in 2019, with 10,688 students; this represents a gain of 11 students, when compared to the then-current 2017 enrollment of 10,677.
The 2019 peak has been quietly adjusted down 21 students from 10,709 projected in 2016-17 report to 10,688; and quietly adjusted down 308 students from 10,996 projected in 2015 report to 10,688 projected in 2017-18 report.
There is no 2018-19 update.
By the 2019-20 update, the actual number of students enrolled in 2019 was 10,404 down 562 students from the 10,996 students projected as the peak in 2019 in the 2015 report. This is down 5% when the 2015 projections anticipated an increase in the first four years.
Each year since 2015, the Western Suffolk BOCES projections are within the 4% margin of error. However, a margin of error suggests that the actual number will hover within a range of +4% and -4% around the base projection trend line. What is most troubling about the Western Suffolk BOCES projections of student enrollment is that the actual numbers are always at the bottom of the range and the rate of decline measured by projected and actual enrollment figures is accelerating.
In short, the enrollment figures are dropping, and each year at a faster rate. This suggests the Western Suffolk BOCES projections, as troubling as they are, have actually been too optimistic.
The 2015 Western Suffolk BOCES study anticipated that the peak K-12 student enrollment in the history of the school district would be 10,996 in 2019 when in fact the district was at that peak in 2015 at 10,817.
The implication of these collapsing enrollment numbers are profound and require measures be taken now to plan for a student population that is projected to be nearly 20% lower than initial projections, from a projected peak of 10,996 in 2019 in the 2015 study to a projected trough of 8,972 in 2030 in the 2020-21 update, a drop of 2,024 students or 18.4%.
This will require a discussion of reduction in headcount among employees of the City School District of New Rochelle, and identifying new sources of revenue to make up for less money coming in through sources like state aid formulas and federal funds like Title I funding.
An even more difficult discussion will be the issue of the Perception of Quality issue suggested by the data which shows an acceleration in the rate of decline in the Western Suffolk BOCES projections which indicate there is some factor outside the Cohort Survival Model which only looks at the normal community processes that affect school enrollment measured by hard data such as births and fertility rates, community migration, enrollment in non-public and charter school, population variations, and resident family characteristics — and ignores soft data like why some public school parents are pulling their children out of the public school system after 8th grade, and other factors.
Next up, we will go inside the numbers to look at the projected and actual impact on the schools directly impacted by downtown development: Trinity Elementary School, Christopher Columbus Elementary School, William B. Ward Elementary School, Isaac E. Young Middle School, Albert Leonard Middle School and New Rochelle High School.
This article is the first in a series by Andrew Newman and Robert Cox.
RELATED:
Demographer Report on Enrollment to New Rochelle Board of Education March 23, 2021 with Board Q&A
Let’s hope school taxes drop proportionately but I doubt it.