Syosset BoE examines enrollments, trends

From page 1 tunity to do so, as there’s housing stock available. It seems that particularly in the wake of the pandemic – with the huge surge in the housing market 18 months ago, where it was extraordinarily volatile –there was much turnover that brought new families into the community. We have not experienced a surge like that (mid2021) during the summer of 2022 and now in summer 2023. It’s a relief in order to plan for enrollment, but we do see this trend and the bunch of students that entered the district will age through the district so as the group ages out of elementary schools it will be going through the middle school and then they’ll age into the high school,” Dr. Rogers explained.

At the board’s special meeting on July 25, School Board Trustee Jack Ostrick asked about the accuracy of district projections for enrollment. Dr. Rogers said the data that indicates more students will be at the middle school level in due time. The question involves the timing in which the higher number of students, now in elementary grades, reaches the middle school levels.

Ostrick commented that Syosset CSD is likely heading towards making significant investments in district buildings’ infrastructure and capacity.

“I think it’s something we need to come to terms with and come to agreement about, because otherwise it’s hard to frame the decisions we have to make,” he noted.

The firm the district has contracted for its enrollment projections geocodes all of the addresses for families of

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existing district students. This allows for a calculation that involves the split from “feeder” schools as for example, some of the Robbins Elementary and South Grove Elementary students go on to attend South Woods Middle School, while others attend H.B. Thompson Middle School.

Superintendent Rogers told the board members, “we are not just trending forward on a line, we are actually taking data of existing families in area homes and taking that to trend which one of the two middle schools the students will go to.”

He also said that with the current statistics, the school district may have about one year more than it projected it would have to adequately prepare aging school buildings for a higher enrollment than in previous years. He explained that the peak of the “bubble” is not the only concern, as the district intends on planning and facilities improvements to address “the ramps” leading up to and following the bubble of higher enrollment.

“We have to start putting room in place to accommodate the ramp, not just the bubble’s peak. With H.B. Thompson Middle School our projections have enrollment plateauing over the next several years and then coming down from that just a little bit, nothing dramatic from either increases or decreases,” the superintendent reported.

“The comparisons between HBT enrollment projections and its current year number were dead-on. With South Woods Middle School the projections were for it to grow a little more than HBT but for now, South Woods is a little below those projections. I still have full confidence in the projections for South Woods’ enrollment to grow, and I do feel we need a plan to accommodate that,” Dr. Rogers added.

Syosset High School will also continue to see a trend towards higher enrollment, the district administration believes. Since

Dr. Rogers started working in Syosset CSD the school has seen a steady increase, to over 100 more students throughout all four grades, year over year.

At its peak, the growth at SHS is expected to be at 10% of its current enrollment. Dr. Rogers explained that this will be a driver for more expansion of facilities, as with that model to accommodate 10% more students, based on 100 classrooms the district would need to add 10 more. The current capital project to add Classroom E94 is likely “Classroom No. 1 of hopefully many to come.” He clearly stated that the need for more classroom spaces will continue to grow in the coming school years.

Board Vice President Brian Grieco shared his thoughts on the consistency of enrollment projections. He said his interpretation of enrollment comes down to the kindergarten enrollments in the district, and whether or not Syosset CSD ends up with “a 20-year bubble with a new plateau, or if it’s one to two years with drastic numbers and then we’ll dip back down.”

Grieco asked if the kindergarten total enrollment for this year and next school year could be “plugged in” to the projections to determine the length of Syosset’s recent surge in enrollment. According to Dr. Rogers, the short answer is ‘no’ because the total enrollment picture is more complicated than each incoming class year of kindergarten students. The district has reviewed data on the number of live births among families already living in Syosset/Woodbury, but the trends indicate there are more families that will move in once children are of elementary school age.

Dr. Rogers said Syosset does see many more students enrolled in their years between first and fourth grade – representing up to 5% per year growth for a given class.

An incoming K-4 class stops growing by the time the cohort reaches the secondary school level, and the projections end up “less volatile” for upper grades.

“We can and do feed data into the model, but an interesting phenomena in Syosset is that our kindergarten class is only about half composed of live births that occurred in Syosset. That class already includes people who moved into the district – the kindergarten class is roughly around 400 students per year while the graduating (12th grade) class is roughly around 550. You would think this means that if we graduate 550 kids but only enroll 400 kindergarten students the district will get smaller by 150 kids….but if you consider, will the 400 kids in kindergarten translate into 550 high school graduates, I can tell you what the trends indicate but for 12 years from now I would not rely on the trends, because through the next five to six years so much will be changing for that graduating class (of 2035),” Dr. Rogers told the board.

With this information on the table, Trustee Ostrick spoke about the short-term and immediate attention the elementary schools in Syosset will need. He said the district should devise a consistent decision-making model to configure and outfit the elementary schools, according to the enrollment figures anticipated.

“I would like specific sets of rule-making for why certain elementary schools will get significant improvements and others may not. We ought to pick some metric as the schools need to have additional space added to them, at a proportion that is consistent with a set of rules and reasons – whether it is based on square-foot-perchild or the maximum capacity with 23 kids per classroom,” he commented.

He suggested the board might have to weigh which schools to address with capital projects with a timeline, and how each elementary school should end up with a certain amount of capacity for more students. Ostrick wants the district to review the number of addresses indicating the origins (neighborhoods) sending students to the elementary schools.

“Ultimately that is the feeding ground for how many people can be at any single school at a given time. At one point I looked at it, and while A.P. Willits Elementary had the most addresses for any school, strangely it had the lowest enrollment,” he said.

Superintendent Rogers says his thoughts were helpful, and Ostrick’s observation about A.P. Willits is accurate but an example of how “counterintuitive” metrics exist.

According to Dr. Rogers the district can understand, once a family moves in they will have children at elementary schools but they eventually move to the middle school level; meanwhile the home address is no longer a factor for the elementary school’s enrollment though the kids are still in the district.

“When you have surges of kids at one school, for a period of time that school will feel tight as the bubble goes through it, The bubble then exits the school and goes on to middle school, but the houses don’t turn over – the housing stock does not go away if we observe a lull at the elementary enrollment because it’s being occupied by middle school or high school-sending families. This contributes to the cyclical nature of seeing our enrollments at school buildings rise and fall, but they are not all rising and falling with one another. As a district we are growing overall, but I can think of (J. Irving) Baylis Elementary with a surge a few years ago which then crested and fell, and now those kids are aging into middle school but the district families remain within the Baylis catchment area,” Dr. Rogers noted.