FYI: Sibling Chart
Just checking in at the new SAP page at the district website and saw something I hadn't seen (or missed) before. At the top of the page to the right is a listing with links to different information. One of them is a spreadsheet of sibling tiebreakers used from 2006-2009. Note the words "to" and "from" in the chart; I missed it and wondered what Group 1 and 2 meant. "To" means incoming and "from" is students from that reference area.
Comments
For instance, Bryant had 11 kids leave the "reference area" to join a sibling. But what I would like to know, of those 11 older siblings, how many of them would have gotten into Bryant based on distance tiebreaker. I guess, I want to know, did they have a choice between Bryant and another school and chose the other, or were they really in a dead zone and couldn't have gotten into Bryant in the first place?
Or is that all inconsequential? Does this relate to new reference areas? I thought we didn't have boundaries for the new SAP yet. So if this is old reference areas, then we really don't know how much of the older sibling going farther was choice or not. What am I missing? What can you conclude from this information?
And, what is going to happen with Spectrum, anyway?
I am confused; I went to the 10 year enrolment projection DeJong PDF... and, while I am no statistician, I do have some critical thinking and analysis skills... and the projection figures made no sense to me...
There's no explanation of methodology used to get to these projections, but each school in each cluster had figures going to Grade 12, despite the fact that none of the schools was a high school
Perhaps I am being ultra dense today (possibly - otherwise why would I be spending so much time on SPS today when there's a much more interesting and gratifying world in which to live?!)... but what do these figures mean? And if this is a stuff up, then the whole capacity management and SAP calculations are stuffed also...
Can anyone enlighten me?
I also had no understanding of the methodology, and that's a big missing point in all this data they provide. They need to define their terms and calculations.
Otherwise, we end up doing what I'm going to do, which is guess what the numbers mean: I think the numbers go through 12 because they are telling us the projected number of kids in that grade level in that reference area, regardless of whether they attend school in the reference area. What I cannot tell, and have always been confused about is how these numbers include children who live in the area but are not enrolled in SPS (i.e. students in private schools, or home schoolers). Many of data tables don't include these students, because they tell us facts about students who are in SPS schools, not children in a reference area.
These projection figures include birth data as well as statistics about movements in and out of reference areas, making me think that those children are included.
But, again, with the lack of methods explanations, I'm guessing. (I haven't looked at the appendix, though -- maybe there's some explanation there?)
Enrollment Projections Report, March 2008... there's a PDF, which closely matches the Board Report Presentation PDF dated February 2008...
Methodology is described.... and the report quite clearly states that there will be significant increased enrolment in the southeast, northwest, north and northeast areas of the city...quite large numbers actually - in many clusters enough children to fill a small school...
Queen Anne/Magnolia - an increase of 360 children; Northwest +300 children; Northeast +777 (with an increasing trend over the past 10 years); North +270, (again with a historical increasing trend); Southeast +255... total increase over 10 years of 1962 children needing spaces in a school...
And we're closing schools, RIFing teachers, increasing class sizes and minimising choice for families?
It is very possible that for purposes of this spreadsheet - reference area was the APP reference area. I say this because if the APP reference area were used then indeed there would be zero siblings as APP students are admitted from "out of reference area" on a space available basis and that process would not have been in place for sibling enrollment.
Another possibility (remote) is that these were the numbers from early registration. I say remote since the spreadsheet is labeled "Open Enrollment." One would presume that these numbers were both early and open enrollment combined but this points to the real issue.
As with so many of these SPS spreadsheets, there are no useful footnotes of any value so much is left to guesswork and non-notated assumptions. Every spreadsheet I prepared for business purposes was required to have a footnote that defined every term and also the assumptions that numbers were drawn from. Every analyst I know uses those practices.
Without these notations, there is no way to independently check the math.