While enrollment is projected to increase in the WW-P district by a minimum of 70 and a maximum of 200 students next year, the school board’s “de facto demographer,” Stan Katz, says he doesn’t believe it’s the beginning of an enrollment increase trend, but rather that it’s the peak of one.##M:[more]##
And although he says it’s too early to tell how a Princeton Junction train station transit village will impact enrollment since no definite numbers for housing have been determined, as long as it does not come on board for at least another six years, the district should be in good shape to handle all of its students.
Next year’s projected increase in enrollment is one of two main driving factors for the anticipated increase in the school budget (the other being energy costs). Budget discussions will continue at the school board meeting on Tuesday, February 12, at 7:30 p.m. at Grover Middle School. A tentative budget hearing has been set for Tuesday, March 25.
The possible enrollment increase still remains in the air because the approved 352 units on the former Akselrad property on Clarksville Road, known as West Windsor Gardens, have yet to be constructed, Katz said. Meanwhile, other developments in both Plainsboro and West Windsor, including an estimated 70 new single-family Toll Brothers units in West Windsor, will add about 60 to 70 new students to the district, Katz said.
Katz said last time he spoke with West Windsor officials, they told him it would take the developers of the West Windsor Gardens project about two years to get all the necessary approvals and complete the 352 units, which average two bedrooms each.
It is unlikely, but it is a possibility that about 170 of those units — with an estimated .7 children per unit — could end up being built this summer and next. That new housing, together with the 70 from the Toll Brothers development, would add about another 130 kids to the system, he said.
“It’s not likely we would get them all by the October 15 official count, even if they build over the summer, but some of them would be here because those people want to get their kids into the system,” Katz said. And the bulk of the early arrivals to any of those houses would be families with children who want to avoid moving them to a new district in the middle of a school year.
“It all depends on your timing, not on the end result,” Katz explained. He said that school officials know how many children will be in the district eventually, but it’s hard to forecast the exact increase for next year.
“It’s one or the other (70 or 200 students). You can’t have something in the middle, unless the build out is half of the Akselrad development,” Katz said. “It’s not like we have this huge range of possibilities. If you tell me right now that Akselrad won’t be built, I will tell you there will be 70 new kids. The forecast is totally dependent on Akselrad.”
“We truly will not know, even by budget time,” Katz added. “We don’t know whether they will start to build in June. The budget’s going to be created by then. It’s a very strange situation.”
Nonetheless, school officials are hoping “they take their sweet time,” with building the development because it will give them time to absorb the end of the increase from the Toll Brothers development, he said.
Unless there is more new housing coming into either township, the enrollment numbers should peak there, Katz said. “Without Akselrad, we would have said that this year, and next year would have been a peak,” Katz said. “Our peak will be whatever year the bulk of the kids come in from Akselrad.”
If that occurs two or three years in the future, which Katz said he doesn’t believe would be the case, the district would be able to start moving some of the kids from Toll Brothers through the system, before the Akselrad kids even made it there.
West Windsor Mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh said he didn’t expect the developers of the Akselrad property to build anything this year. “I really doubt it very much, but anything could happen,” he said. “The economy is not very encouraging for the housing market. If they do, maybe we’ll get some units, but not really on a big scale.”
Last February Katz made a presentation to West Windsor officials about the impact a transit village would have on school enrollment. In that presentation, Katz said that he believed the peak in enrollment in district schools would occur in 2009, at a little over 9,”600 students, and then begin a very slow decline to what he called a steady-state equilibrium of around 8,”300 students in about 12 years. According to that projection, Katz said the district would be able to accommodate 700 students that would likely be generated by a development with 2,”000 units, including affordable housing but not including child-friendly features, provided the new residents did not move in before 2014 at earliest.
Katz’s presentation took into account the impending construction of the Akselrad development and the expected transit village, but did not factor in other possible developments.
A few months later, Katz retracted his student estimates, saying that applications before the planning board at the time would result in 32 new homes in West Windsor, including one development on Princeton-Hightstown Road that had already been approved. He said he was told that no other housing projects were on the horizon. With the 32 new homes would come 40 new students to the school district. And if that could happen in just four months, he couldn’t make a six-year forecast with any confidence that there would “be 300 seats available in 2013 if we can’t even be sure that there won’t be any more housing developments in the next year or two.”
That move drew criticism recently from Intercap Properties CEO Steve Goldin — whose company owns 25 acres in the redevelopment area — who has embarked on a series of public presentations about his hopes for the 350-acre redevelopment. During a presentation at the Village Grande last month, Goldin accused Katz of “reading the tea leaves” and siding with the last spring’s municipal election winners (three opponents to an extensive transit village project). Said Goldin: “Katz stepped away from his projections. Politics were involved. He read the tea leaves.”
At that Village Grande meeting, Goldin proposed an empirical approach: Begin the project with a small number of units, say 300, and see what the actual impact is on school enrollment. Then, adjust the final build-out based on that data.
In an interview on January 30, Katz said, “the transit village situation is so fluid with so many people saying so many contradictory things that there isn’t any point in trying to estimate the effect of the transit village.”
Further, Katz claimed his numbers and formulas for calculating the impact to school enrollment have both stayed exactly the same. “The assumptions that went into them have been changing right and left willy-nilly,” he said. “One of the earliest changes that was made is that they first said this was going to be eight to twelve years out in the future. All of a sudden it’s five to six years. That changed everything. I haven’t flip-flopped.”
Further, “if it happens 12 years from now, I will have no worries. If it happens six years from now, I have small worries. If it happens three years from now, I have huge worries,” he added.
Katz says that since the assumptions keep changing, he has to respond. “As long as they keep changing, my numbers will keep changing,” he said.
Still, Katz says there are so many different possibilities when it comes to the transit village — how much housing it includes, which plan will be used, and what, if any, percentage of housing would be senior units, he said. But “timing may be more important that the number of units,” he says. “You can put 1,”000 units in there if you do it 12 years from now.”
Katz said he has heard that a transit village wouldn’t come about until anywhere from six to ten years in the future, “in which cause, it really would have no effect on the peak number in the school system,” Katz said. “If it’s in the next couple of years, we’ll be in real trouble.”
That’s because enrollment at district elementary schools in West Windsor is rising as a result of all of the new development in the township. It is the district’s policy that it send children in kindergarten through third grades to schools in their same townships, which means that West Windsor children either attend Hawk or Dutch Neck elementary schools.
“If the transit village is ever built, the transit village is physically located in West Windsor,” he said. “Elementary students would got to West Windsor schools. If it happens too quickly, and we haven’t been able to clear seats in Maurice Hawk and Dutch Neck, the school board would be in the awkward position of having to change its policy and send some K-3 students to Plainsboro schools, or possibly the unthinkable, which is to start adding classrooms to the two existing schools or start rearranging things.”
The number of elementary school students already is playing a big deal in the enrollment increase for this year, Katz says, since West Windsor’s elementary schools are “getting very, very close to capacity already, and we still haven’t absorbed the final year of Toll Brothers single-family construction.” While High School North has plenty of room to absorb students, its moving the students out of those elementary schools that school officials are trying to do.
The situation would have been much worse, Katz explains, if the Toll Brothers children had come in 10 years ago. “We would have had to build at least another elementary school.”
Both Katz and WW-P Spokeswoman Gerri Hutner say this hasn’t been the case because the board has been very proactive in preparing for enrollment increases over the past decade.
Hutner says the district has known about slight increases as school board liaisons to various township entities in both Plainsboro and West Windsor have kept officials updated on what has been going on. When new projects come to town, “we know about them, and certainly work the demographic projections and enrollment projections into the thinking process as we go forward.”
“All of the students come into a central registration system,” she added. “We can monitor on a daily basis the number of students coming in now until the end of summer.”
Officials have been dealing with various enrollment increases in the past by budgeting for the increase number of staff members will be needed at the schools. “We have to make sure we have very strong and comfortable student-teacher ratios,” she said. And since people move in and out of various developments in both townships, one grade level at a school might be higher one year that it had been before. Officials in this case also have the option of simply teachers around, rather than hiring new ones.
Similarly, Katz said he believes that just from what he’s seen in the last two years with regard to redevelopment, school officials will know when the transit village is coming probably with about three years to spare. “If things start to happen, you’ll have about three years worth of lead time to make decisions,” he said. “They’re not going to put the housing in first before the infrastructure,” which includes roads and the like, he said. “Housing will probably come right before the retail, which would be the last item. You’ve got a window of opportunity to look at the situation, make estimates, see how many kids are moving from the school district at this point. You’ll have plenty of time.”
So, in that sense, Katz said he is not worried about the transit village. However, “I’m worried about it if one of the plans calls for 1,”000 housing units. I would not be very happy,” he said, and that’s because “I don’t think you can have a number that high after Toll Brothers,” he said.
“We really need to absorb the finish of Toll Brothers, and whenever Akselrad comes in, those have be absorbed before you would even think about what you would do with transit village kids,” he said.
The increase of enrollment is just one driving factor in preliminary budget discussions. The other is an increase in energy costs, as Katz pointed out that while one or two percent of a household budget might consist of energy and transportation costs, it can be around seven to eight percent for school districts.
“Transportation alone is a $7 million item on a $140 million budget,” he said. “When that goes up by possibly 40 to 50 percent (in cost), we got a problem.”
He explained that the state allows districts to increase their budgets based on CPI numbers, “but schools have a much higher portion of their budget caused by heating, electricity, transportation, and gasoline costs. That’s the other piece where our natural costs are going to rise by much more than national inflation.”
Hutner says that when talking about which factor is driving the school budget more, it’s hard to say because by nature, the district has at least somewhat of a control over enrollment increases — how many students to put in a class, if a teacher should be moved from one building to another. With energy costs, it does not, as other sources provide the energy.
