Update to Lake Oswego enrollment forecast shows slight decreases in kindergarten

Earlier this year, the Portland State University Population Research Center presented an enrollment forecast for the future of Lake Oswego School District. An update to that forecast was presented to the Lake Oswego School Board last week.

Overall, the new forecast shows slight decreases in enrollment districtwide. These changes stem not only from school boundary changes, but more recent data used to generate the projections. This updated forecast shows lower enrollment for the next few school years before returning to around 7,000 students in the future.

Enrollment forecasts serve an important role in planning the financial and facilities needs of the school district in the coming decades. The enrollment forecasts provided by PSU look forward to the 2038-39 school year.

Dr. Ethan Sharygin, the principal investigator for PSU’s Population Research Center’s LOSD population and enrollment forecasts, returned with LOSD business director Stuart Ketzler to provide context for the changes and what they imply.

“In the weeks since I’ve been here last, Stuart and I have been in conversation about the tables and some of the unusual things we’d seen in them — particularly related to grade progression issues,” said Sharygin. “In the course of that, we realized we’d failed to incorporate the changes in the attendance zones of Oak Creek and Lake Grove, which didn’t affect kindergarten but did affect the other grades.”

The grade progression ratio for a school district represents how many students carry on from one grade to the next. If the GPR is higher than one, that means more students enrolled compared to the year prior. According to Sharygin, Lake Oswego School District has historically had high GPRs, which means many families migrate to Lake Oswego and enroll their kids in public schools.

“Both Oak Creek and Lake Grove drew their projected progression from kindergarten onward from the period before the boundary adjustment,” said Sharygin. “The other significant change was the inclusion of some recent data on intent to enroll, so we looked at the correlation between the numbers in the intent to enroll that we have in May compared to the incoming class sizes in October and those have fluctuated between 9 and 15%.”