July 10, 2023
School Concurrency: How FL Districts Monitor Community Growth for Capacity Planning
Schools are the cornerstones of our community. They provide meeting spaces for scout troop meetings, watching football on Fridays, and listening to the band play and practice. They are so much more than places of education — they are central components to how people live and see their neighborhoods. That’s why it’s SO important to plan correctly where a school is. The more overcrowded a school is, the less confidence the community has in the school’s ability to take care of them.
School concurrency plays into all of these factors. Whether you’re a homeowner, a parent or guardian to students, a school board member, or even just a part of the community, you’ll want to know what school concurrency is and how it affects you, your schools, and your school district.
How Do School Districts Monitor Community Development?
Towns, cities, and communities are not stagnant entities. Populations grow and change, and age demographics shift. This presents a unique challenge for local schools. Local public schools need to have space for each school-aged child in their zone, but each year, the number of children at each grade level changes. In order to predict how many children need to be served, school districts monitor community development using concurrency.
Concurrency is an evaluation of growth for residential homes and how many students that will potentially produce for the school district. A school district evaluates a new residential district by applying a Student Generation Rate (SGR) to the number of planned homes in a development. The student generation rate is the number of students in an average household, determined by an analysis of residential land use and student address locations. This rate multiplied by the residential homes in the school zone determines the projected number of students in an area.
This is also useful for land planning and is one of the valid objections to residential expansion. For example, if there was a plan to double the number of residential homes in an elementary school zone, that would bring an increase in children in the school system. If this predicted additional number exceeds the school zoning capacity, the community can expect an overcrowded school.
So, Why Is School Concurrency Important?
If you’re still wondering why concurrency is important outside of school planning and how it affects you if you’re not in the development industry, it’s a simple reason. School concurrency affects the entire community and drives the rezoning process for school attendance zones. Every aspect of how your family grows within your community matters and your presence has an impact on our school district.
JBPro Are the Experts in School Planning and Navigating School Concurrency
We work with school districts throughout the state of Florida to develop solutions to ensure efficient resource allocation, space utilization, and effective student distributions.
Our data-driven approach to the planning of Florida schools also informs our public and private school site design and land surveying services. Contact our team at JBPro, where data meets innovation, to support K-12 school planning.