Lisa and I had a bit of an epiphany last night about the District's demographic data. The "Population Projections" that the demographer comes up with....drum roll, please....are actually correct. Really correct. Let me explain.
A lot of people (um, including me, for full disclosure) want to question the demographic data because it's so far off what actual membership ends up being each year.
Terms:
Population projection = the number of AISD students the demographer says lives in the school's attendance zone.
Membership = actual students who show up and attend that school.
So, let's look at the last two years.
The Population Projection for 2008-2009 was 988, but we had an actual membership of 1061. Why the big difference? Transfers: The number last year was 73. The numbers add up exactly.
This year, population projection (2009-2010) is 1019, but we have around 1080 students. The difference? You guessed it - transfers. We have 71 this year.
Now, we've talked a bit on this blog about transfers and Mrs. Butler has talked about it, too - it's the district policy to allow certain kinds of transfers (those are detailed in the presentation below.) And yes, they allow priority transfers even when a school is as overcrowded as Mills.
You may not like that policy - but don't get mad at Mrs. Butler, she's just doing her job. Write letters to the board, go to their meetings and speak, if you want to.
The point here is that the demographer data is pretty close - dead on for last year and this year.
So what does the demographer say is going to happen to the Mills population? Over the next five years, our population gradually reduces by 40 children by 2013-2014. Whatever boundary changes are made, we should definitely factor in - not only this slight reduction in population, but a realistic number of transfers similar to what we've seen in the past few years.
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First, thank you Michelle and Lisa for all the time and energy you're putting into really understanding the situations and advocate for a good and balanced solution for Mills.
ReplyDeleteWhat I've seen is that the demographer's projections for the upcoming year is usually reasonably close, but the longer range projections are usually low (sometimes substantially low). The demographer assumes that people stay in the neighborhood and the kids grow up. He doesn't account for people moving out of the neighborhood and new families with young kids moving close to good schools.
For instance, here are projections for the 2009-2010 school year population of Mills from the following demographer's reports:
report year projection
for 2009-2010
2006-2007 936
2007-2008 988
2008-2009 1019
So the demographer had to adjust the projection for the 2009-2010 school year upward each year. Yes, the 2008-2009 projection for 2009-2010 is pretty much on target, but the 2006-2007 projection for 2009-2010 is off by about 10%.
I'm sorry I can't go back further, I could only find these reports for these three years online.
Thank you!
---Lucia
Lucia,
ReplyDeleteThanks for offering these numbers - when you add in the transfers for each year on top of the projections, that accounts for the approximately 10% that the demographer is off. He's off, but not by much 1-3%, the rest of the inconsistency is reflected in our transfer numbers.
It's one reason that we can't simply get by with moving 60-100 students. More will have to be effected by our boundary process. After consulting with Mrs. Butler, we think the number has to be more like 150-175 students.
Hopefully that can be accomplished in the area around mills (west of Mopac) by sending some kids to Kiker, and some to Patton. The more I look at the map, Boone just seems to be sticking so far out there. Seems that the students Boone wants could be added from east and south of Boone. Although, I frankly think that the board should look at the underlying reasons why a school is far under capacity and address that first. Then they might find that everything else takes care of itself.
ReplyDeleteLucia's comment was that the error is NOT due to transfers. The error in the projections gets worse the further out you project (not surprising really). So if you take the projection for this year from ~3 years back, it is off by 10%, and that is after removing the effect of transfers.
ReplyDelete--Matthew
recalculated... actual error is more like 8%
ReplyDelete