Enrollment Trends: Programs for the Future. A Planning Guide for Districts with Declining Enrollments.

This document is designed to offer guidance to those school district officials in New York State who are faced with making decisions about how their districts will cope with declining enrollment. Enrollment in New York schools is no longer growing at a predictable rate as it did for so many years. School districts need to establish a different perspective on enrollment decline in order to formulate adequate and creative means of coping with this phenomenon. The district must first collect demographic information to define the decline problem. Current and future needs must be analyzed, future facility needs outlined, and the fiscal requirements of future program, staff, and facilities must be determined. This volume's appendixes contain data on enrollment decline and building requirements for the state of New York. Chapters discuss analyzing programs, staff, facilities, and educational finance, as well as determining study strategy for enrollment decline. Declining enrollment is a complex problem, and it is not likely that districts can adequately cope with it if they deal with it in a fragmented manner. (Author/DS)