projected to decrease by 31 students (-0.8%), as the current grade 12 cohort at 1,000 students is replaced by a grade 9 cohort below 950 students. High school enrollment is projected to continue to decline in fall 2026 and fall 2027 as the cohorts of over 1,000 students graduate and are replaced with smaller grade 9 cohorts. The high schools begin to see stability starting in fall 2028, with enrollment around 3,840 students.
Future Enrollment Projection Methodology
The enrollment projections are typically prepared by combining the current year’s official enrollment as reported on October 1, 2024, to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education with other available demographic data for Newton. A model of five-year average cohort survival ratios is applied to the current enrollment data (in grades one through twelve). The projections are calculated on an individual school and grade basis and then aggregated into system-wide projections. Adjusted three-year averages are used for kindergarten. For the cohort survival ratio methodology, a cohort is defined as a group of students in a specific grade level who are at a specific school or are all going to the same school in the next year. To calculate the cohort survival ratio for a particular grade level in a particular year, the number of students enrolled in the cohort for the current year is divided by the number of students in that cohort from the prior year. These cohort survival ratios for each grade level and school in Newton for the past five years are averaged to calculate the five-year average cohort survival ratio for each grade level and school. These ratios are then applied to this year’s current resident enrollment at each grade and school to calculate the projections for the next five years. Non-resident students are not included in the cohort for the cohort survival ratio calculation but are added to the total projection for the next five years after the cohort survival ratio is applied to the current year’s enrollment. For example, assuming that the five-year average cohort survival ratio for Bowen, Memorial-Spaulding, and Zervas grade 5 students moving on to grade 6 at Oak Hill is 0.97 and there are 232 resident students in this group, the cohort calculation would yield 225 (232 x 0.97) students. Eight current non-resident students would be added to this total, resulting in a final projection of 233 students for students entering the 6th grade at Oak Hill next year. The typical cohort survival ratio methodology of enrollment projections using five-year historical data yields the projections for grades 1 through 12, although it has been adjusted again this year to omit 2020 because of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic (and instead uses a four- year average of data from 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021). This same adjusted methodology omitting 2020 was also used for the projections of the past three years. In addition, the adjusted five- year cohort survival ratios were also adjusted for the kindergarten-to-grade 1 cohort and the grade five-to-six cohort because of the shift in district trends for these cohorts that appear to be a lingering impact of the pandemic. These adjusted cohort survival ratios were increased slightly to reflect the shift in enrollment patterns observed last year and this year in these cohorts. The kindergarten projections have been calculated using an adjusted three-year average of previous kindergarten enrollments. Kindergarten projections have been made with a three-year, four- year, or five-year average methodology since 2014; prior to 2014, city census data was utilized for kindergarten projections. The shift to the average methodology for kindergarten occurred
-309-
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator