Alex Reutter 2021-02-23
The purpose of this project is to help shed some light on questions surrounding enrollment in schools in Vermont, especially the Burlington district. It is a reference from which easier-to-consume conclusions and recommendations can be drawn.
I originally ran this report in 2018 on data through the end of the 2016-2017 school year, when the school district of Burlington, VT, was in its nth consecutive year of staff cuts, and parents were concerned about whether these cuts will adversely affect the quality of education provided by the district.
Now I’ve added more years of data, as available from the VTAoE.
While there is good evidence that statewide and Chittenden countywide enrollment is dropping, the data show that Burlington’s K-12 enrollment has been stable over the time, and the expansion of the Pre-K program has actually increased total enrollment since 2003.
The VT Agency of Education (VTAoE)maintains a portal where you can download reports of enrollment at Vermont’s Public schools. The data goes back to the 2003-2004 school year. Because it is time-consuming to submit the requests and download the data, I have saved original copies of Excel exports produced by the portal in this public GitHub repository.
The school district produces annual reports that are publicly available. The numbers from the BSD Annual Reports are slightly different from the VTAOE numbers; my understanding is that this is because the numbers in each of the reports are pulled at different times of the school year, and enrollment fluctuates over the course of the school year.
The plots in this project are based on the VTAoE data.
In order to make this analysis open and replicable, the code used to produce the analysis is in this public GitHub repository. At the moment, I am using R code to work with the data.
Unfortunately, the VTAOE reports are not in good condition for performing further analysis. In order to get the data into shape, I wrote the data processing.r file. This processing file combines the reports and restructures them into a single dataset with the following columns:
- School, which identifies the school
- OperatingDistrict, which identifies the operating district the school is a part of
- SupervisoryUnion, which identifies the supervisory union or school district that the operating district is a part of
- County, which identifies the county in which the supervisory union operates
- Grade, which identifies the grade for which enrollment is reported. VTAOE does not have classroom-level data
- Year, which identifies the year that the school term ends; thus, rows with the value 2014 for Year report enrollment for the 2013-2014 school year
- Enrollment, which is the number of students enrolled in a given year in a given grade at a given school
It is clear that, in Vermont as a whole, total K-12 enrollment is decreasing, and over the 16 years of data available, the decline is near the 20% claimed by Sec. Holcombe.
The plot below shows that the rate of decline differs from county to county. There is a separate line to represent each county, which shows the enrollment in that county, relative to the maximum enrollment observed. Essex and Grafton counties have experienced the most severe declines, while Lamoille and Chittenden county have seen the least declines.
This chart displays a ratio rather than the total enrollment because this makes the year-to-year changes easier to compare across counties.
Let’s look more closely at the supervisory unions and school districts within Chittenden county. This is the same style of plot as shown for comparing the county-to-county enrollment, but here there is a separate line to represent each supervisory union or school district.
What this plot shows is that, within Chittenden county, most districts appear to have experienced a decline in K-12 enrollment; however, Burlington has held steady. Update: with the extra data available, it appears that Burlington’s enrollment could now be declining.
The following table shows the year-by-year total enrollment in Burlington School District, not including the Pre-K students.
| year | EnrollmentSum | maxEnrollment | enrollmentRatio |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2004 | 3535 | 3611 | 0.9789532 |
| 2005 | 3517 | 3611 | 0.9739684 |
| 2006 | 3510 | 3611 | 0.9720299 |
| 2007 | 3515 | 3611 | 0.9734146 |
| 2008 | 3487 | 3611 | 0.9656605 |
| 2009 | 3498 | 3611 | 0.9687067 |
| 2010 | 3466 | 3611 | 0.9598449 |
| 2011 | 3556 | 3611 | 0.9847688 |
| 2012 | 3527 | 3611 | 0.9767377 |
| 2013 | 3588 | 3611 | 0.9936306 |
| 2014 | 3611 | 3611 | 1.0000000 |
| 2015 | 3549 | 3611 | 0.9828302 |
| 2016 | 3567 | 3611 | 0.9878150 |
| 2017 | 3502 | 3611 | 0.9698145 |
| 2018 | 3430 | 3611 | 0.9498754 |
| 2019 | 3380 | 3611 | 0.9360288 |
This chart breaks it down by school.
This chart breaks it down by grade.
The following table shows the year-by-year total enrollment in Burlington School District, including the Pre-K children.
| year | EnrollmentSum | maxEnrollment | enrollmentRatio |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2004 | 3611 | 4006 | 0.9013979 |
| 2005 | 3577 | 4006 | 0.8929106 |
| 2006 | 3589 | 4006 | 0.8959061 |
| 2007 | 3546 | 4006 | 0.8851722 |
| 2008 | 3520 | 4006 | 0.8786820 |
| 2009 | 3549 | 4006 | 0.8859211 |
| 2010 | 3527 | 4006 | 0.8804294 |
| 2011 | 3613 | 4006 | 0.9018972 |
| 2012 | 3606 | 4006 | 0.9001498 |
| 2013 | 3970 | 4006 | 0.9910135 |
| 2014 | 4006 | 4006 | 1.0000000 |
| 2015 | 3971 | 4006 | 0.9912631 |
| 2016 | 3962 | 4006 | 0.9890165 |
| 2017 | 3950 | 4006 | 0.9860210 |
| 2018 | 3901 | 4006 | 0.9737893 |
| 2019 | 3834 | 4006 | 0.9570644 |
This chart breaks it down by school.
That is the Champlain School whose enrollment suddenly jumped in the 2012-2013 school year, due to the addition of Pre-K students.
| year | EnrollmentSum | maxEnrollment | enrollmentRatio |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2004 | 287 | 693 | 0.4141414 |
| 2005 | 278 | 693 | 0.4011544 |
| 2006 | 293 | 693 | 0.4227994 |
| 2007 | 290 | 693 | 0.4184704 |
| 2008 | 288 | 693 | 0.4155844 |
| 2009 | 317 | 693 | 0.4574315 |
| 2010 | 324 | 693 | 0.4675325 |
| 2011 | 337 | 693 | 0.4862915 |
| 2012 | 334 | 693 | 0.4819625 |
| 2013 | 626 | 693 | 0.9033189 |
| 2014 | 637 | 693 | 0.9191919 |
| 2015 | 635 | 693 | 0.9163059 |
| 2016 | 615 | 693 | 0.8874459 |
| 2017 | 667 | 693 | 0.9624820 |
| 2018 | 693 | 693 | 1.0000000 |
| 2019 | 675 | 693 | 0.9740260 |