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Wake County Public School System, Raleigh, North Carolina

OREd worked with WCPSS to develop a long-range school plan which utilized student population forecasts to determine optimal target areas for new school sites.

The Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) is the largest school system in North Carolina and is faced with many school planning challenges:

• WCPSS is experiencing a dramatic increase in student population growth. As of 2008, WCPSS has over 140,000 students with annual net growth ranging from 6,000 to 8,000 students;
  
  
• Additionally, WCPSS is challenged with a long-range school construction plan that must be responsive to growth plans from 13 planning agencies (12 municipalities and one county agency).

In the fall of 2006, faced with a school building bond of nearly $1 billion and highly publicized conversions of 20 elementary schools to multi-track year-round schools, the Operations Research and Education Laboratory (OREd) was charged with identifying optimal school-banking sites for the next 20 years.

This project is, to date, the most “mathematical-heavy” projects ever conducted by OREd. There were two such projects conducted in the country to forecast student enrollment at a regional level; however, the forecast outputs were too coarse and did not have the necessary resolution to identify future school sites. Working closely with WCPSS’s historical student data and the planning community of Wake County, OREd developed a mathematical model enabling high resolution gowth forecast based on the long-range land use plan.

The well documented Long-Range School Plan can be seen at the WCPSS’s web site at: www.wcpss.net/demographics/lrenroll/index.html

The WCPSS project successfully provided a road map for future school siting that was driven by the municipalities and the county’s long-range residential growth plans. The intangible success of this project is that the school system and municipalities now have reciprocal responsibilities to adhere to their respective long-range plans.

OREd continues to work with WCPSS and the 13 planning agencies to update and calibrate the student population growth model.