New York City is growing fast—we need to ensure we plan for our students.

There are exciting changes coming to New York City neighborhoods, including new construction, community rezonings and a major expansion of inclusionary housing. Additionally, the City has seen unprecedented growth in recent years. Since 2010, the city population has grown by 4.6%—the highest rate of growth since the 1920s. These trends make it incredibly important to have accurate data for city planning purposes—especially when it comes to accommodating a rapidly growing Pre-K-12 student population. An enhanced student population prediction model with more granular insights will significantly help the NYC Department of Education efficiently plan for enrollment changes and enhance school zoning efforts, so that all public school students have equal access to the resources they need.

How New York City projects public school student population changes

Currently, the City derives 5-year and 10-year projections of grade-by-grade public school student enrollment for each of the 32 community school districts using a model that factors birth rates, projected population and historical student enrollment data. A "cohort-survival model” is applied with some variation to produce student population projections. The district-wide enrollment projections are then allocated to smaller sub-zones (each district has between two and five sub-zones) based on historical enrollment change by sub-zone.

Additional data on changes in housing are added to these demographic projections, and the volume of future enrollment from new housing is based on the housing multiplier matrix included in the New York City Environmental Quality Review (CEQR). Enrollment from new housing is developed on a sub-district level. These projections help inform capital planning and broader citywide planning.

On a more local level, the NYC Department of Education also analyzes the public school student population of school catchments areas (“zone sizes”), particularly when looking to propose changes to elementary and middle school zone lines. The current methodology looks at five years of zone sizes, applies a growth rate if applicable, and factors in new housing using the same CEQR housing multiplier.

We need your help

The City is looking for alternative data models that can enable more granular and precise student projections—ideally, detailing the number of prospective students at different age groups by city block with regularly updated projections at 1-year, 2-year and 5-year increments.

The City is open to models that utilize private or public data. For the first round of applications, we are providing some enrollment figures to help inform your first model. However, you are encouraged to consider other possible data sources as well, including but not limited to:

• real estate and housing data
• data on consumer purchasing behavior
• census and survey data
• pedestrian and transit data
• data on day care operations and service providers
• birth rates and other demographic data
• school enrollment data