He helps schools predict enrollment. it gets tougher than ever

Bob Templeton has spent nearly three decades thinking about the correlation between demographic trends and public school enrollment. The job has become more difficult than ever.

In fast-growing Texas, where Templeton is located, total public school enrollment increased by as many as 60,000 students in the year before the pandemic. Since then, this growth has slowed significantly. Last year, K-12 enrollment increased by only 12,000 students, even though the state's overall population grew faster than most other states.

“That's when I saw the data and said, 'Wow, something's going on here,'” Templeton said.

Templeton's job is to help school districts identify the problems and coach them on how to deal with them. He serves as vice president of the Texas Zonda Corporation's schools division.

The company contracts with school districts in Texas and other states to provide enrollment projections and demographic analysis to help school systems prepare for future needs, including new construction, building closings, revised boundaries and staffing adjustments. These analyzes leverage Zonda's extensive database of new U.S. new homes.

Declining enrollment has become a hot topic and an increasingly common reality for school district leaders across the country. School districts have faced more competition in recent years due to the proliferation of charter schools and the expansion of state-funded private school choice programs. Falling birth rates portend fewer children going to school The next few years. A small number of students have fallen off the radar of schools since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

When schools lose enrollment, they also lose funding, even if costs like utilities and staff salaries remain the same. Most states calculate school funding based in part on the number of students a school district enrolls. Overall population decline means a reduction in local property taxes, which in turn account for a large portion of most K-12 school district budgets.

Education Week spoke with Templeton by phone last month about his analysis of current enrollment trends. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

When a school district contracts with your company and needs help determining enrollment patterns, how do you get started?

For 70 or 80 percent of people, it's a routine. We're working with those fast-growing areas, suburban communities where they're building hundreds if not thousands of homes a year. These school districts need to plan when and where to hold bond elections, build schools, open schools. We help them with the logistics, how do you draw attendance boundaries and shift areas to accommodate the new building?

We do have some urban areas where enrollment is declining. We were there to do the opposite. We're helping them figure out how to close schools. Ten years ago, we would probably complete one or two such projects every three or four years. This year, I believe we completed six of those projects. I think this will now become a regular annual event.

How difficult is it to predict enrollment in a specific school district, region, or state?

In the past, understanding housing-related enrollment growth was very predictable. Because the correlation is so strong, we can predict changes in enrollment to within 1%. We noticed that about seven to eight years ago, this connection started to weaken. It's not as closely related as we've seen.

This definitely makes our job more difficult. It has now slipped to the 2% to 3% range. We're thinking about, how can we improve our modeling based on what we're seeing?

What I find is that what we end up doing now is, the school year starts, enrollment starts, let's say we're 400 or 500 kids short. The question is, what happened? We're doing our detective work, we're trying to determine, are they leaving because of issues within the district, or are they leaving because of a new curriculum, or a neighboring school district changing its policy on transfers?

It's almost like playing chess. The school year starts and the first step is taking action on enrollment models, and then districts are scrambling: We need to open our borders, we need to offer choice programs to create magnet schools, provide more choice so that we can get those kids back .

What lies behind the unpredictable fluctuations?

Changes in birth rates will certainly have an impact. The normal student yield per single-family home that we have seen over the years has declined.

But with that comes room for choice. Ten years ago, people moved into a neighborhood, they looked up and saw what the basic areas were that served that neighborhood, and then they went there. They don’t explore and think about whether there are other options.

Over the past decade, in Texas, we have seen the expansion of charter schools. Now I think the same influence is homeschooling. There have been huge advances in online resources for hybrid learning, homeschooling, and now with social media and the ability to easily connect, it's more than just a personal experience even for homeschoolers. They have become micro-communities. They have graduations, they have proms, they do things in small groups that wouldn't have happened ten years ago.

From your observations, what fuels enthusiasm for alternatives?

It's been almost a perfect storm over the past four years. Indeed, the pandemic has brought about this wave of change. Some of the changes are related to flexible work arrangements, accelerating some options for families to relocate to different areas.

We are experiencing political tensions the likes of which I have never seen. I attend and attend 50 to 80 school board meetings a year. For some of these school districts, no matter what decision they make, there's an equal number of people who are unhappy with both sides' decisions. Early in the pandemic, I attended a meeting at an Austin-area school district where they required masks, but some parents were angry about it, and some were angry enough that they weren't enforcing it. Man, they didn't stand a chance.

Now, at every board meeting I attend, it is common for me to hear from three to a dozen patrons wishing to make public comments to the board on a variety of topics. Ten years ago, I could count on one hand the number of board meetings I had at the start of a board meeting where I needed to hear public input. When you do this, it's about specific events about what happened to their children.

Now it's wide-ranging, touching on library books, bathrooms and a range of politically charged topics. This tension drives a wedge between parents on both sides of the equation.

How do these political tensions affect enrollment? What evidence do you have that there is a connection?

I attended the Texas Homeschool Conference last summer just because I was curious. I just attended like a fly on the wall. I didn't anticipate what I was going to encounter. 6,000 families participated. It's already packed with people. They held trade shows with suppliers. They are organized and they are communicating with the masses.

I interview two to five couples at a time: Why are you doing this? How long do you plan to do this? What are the advantages? What are the disadvantages? What are your thoughts on public education?

For many of them, it's not about ideology but about choice. It's about flexibility. In these families, one parent does not work full time. Their parents spend a certain amount of time each week helping their children with their education.

When you're in a traditional public school structure, your preparation for the day has to start at 6:30 in the morning, get up, eat, get dressed, and go to school. So it takes up nine hours of the day, whereas homeschooling is probably a minimum of two to four hours a day. Some people are passionate about environmental issues, and boy, they could spend more time working on them and be more creative. No matter what your niche is, you can find a micro or homeschool community or element to support your passion.

I do believe that the homeschool factor has the greatest impact on public education. Enrollment is down. I think the school district thinks it has to do with ideology. But I think it's more about what I'm seeing with Millennials and Gen Z: They want choice, they want more control.

How do you respond to the ongoing lack of reliable homeschool enrollment data?

The problem in Texas is that homeschooling parents do not have to report to the Texas Education Agency that they are homeschooling. We really don't have a good way to understand what's going on with homeschool enrollment. During the next legislative session, Gov. [Greg] Abbott will definitely be promoting coupons and options. If there is any funding tied to homeschooling as a credit, I would expect them to need to report that they are homeschooling in order to receive the money. Maybe we can start to see what those numbers actually look like.

What else might affect public school enrollment?

Homeownership rates are at record lows. There are several factors at play surrounding homeownership.

One of them is cost. Costs have really increased over the past three years due to the pandemic. There are supply chain issues, labor shortages and bureaucratic hurdles that must be overcome to get new land deals approved. Then you layer the cost of financing on top of the mortgage rate. Now their ratio is 7%. Combined with sharply rising costs, this puts homeownership out of reach for many truly young buyers. Many Millennials are hesitant to even make this kind of commitment. They prefer to rent and have the flexibility to move.

Now, we're seeing a real explosion of single-family rental communities in Zonda. It is probably the fastest growing of all types of residential construction. Multifamily apartments have been dominant for some time. But now this single-family rental product is really growing at an incredible rate.

We've seen a massive loss of trust in institutions. Education falls into this category. In the past, the backbone of community was, you bought a house, you went to church, you went to public school, you went to the park, you played in these city leagues. Those pillars no longer exist.