Five-year projections for every school in your district — built from your own state data, updated whenever your state posts new numbers, and traceable back to the source.
Any school district in the country. In most cases, ready and available to your district within 24 hours.
Do we have room at the elementary school? Do we consolidate? Can we defend the bond? Do we need another teacher at that grade, or one fewer?
Every one of those decisions rests on how many students you will have in five years. For most districts the honest answer lives in a spreadsheet built years ago by someone who has since moved on.
A formal study runs twenty to forty thousand dollars, which is why most districts this size never commission one. And a study is a snapshot — by the following autumn it is describing a district that has already moved. If you already work with a demographer, keep them; we would rather sit alongside that work than replace it.
Enrollment has only three sources: the students you have, the ones you lose, and the ones who have not arrived yet.
Cohort survival is the method — tried, proven, and what the projection rests on. What we add are variables, and how many are available depends on the data you can share. Geocoded student records open up several that summary counts cannot, and that geocoded data is secure and carries no personally identifiable information. Every variable stays visible and separable, so you can see which assumption moved the number.
Every autumn they come back, one grade higher. That is the steadiest pattern in any district, and it carries the projection — cohort survival, run on your own history. And births five years ago already tell you who walks into kindergarten next.
Some children who live in your district enroll somewhere else: private, home, or the district next door. That share shifts slowly and quietly, and it moves your number more than most districts expect.
Every approved subdivision is a future classroom. Each one traced to the school it feeds, the grades it fills, and the year the keys are handed over.
Each variable is visible on its own. You can see what it does to the projection, leave it out if you disagree with it, and tell a board exactly which assumption is carrying the forecast.
Zone lines say where a student is supposed to attend. They do not say where the student is sitting in October.
K12 Dashboard shows you both. Each school gets a map of the zones it is actually drawing from, with the number of students coming out of each one and how that has shifted year by year. Beside it sits a sortable table of every school and every grade, so you can see where the pull comes from and where it lands.
From there you redraw a boundary on the map and watch the enrollment move before you propose it to anyone — which grades fill, which buildings clear, what it does to the bus routes. Most projections stop at a district total. This is the part that tells you which building is about to run out of room.
A minute of your time. We will build your district and send you the link.
The district-wide five-year number is the strongest thing the model produces.
Reliable grade by grade, with kindergarten the one to watch — it turns on choices families have not made yet.
Per school the projection is directional. Read the spread before you redraw a boundary.
Typically closer than the year-to-year swing your district already sees. The measured figures behind that sit in the technical packet, and your analyst is welcome to them.
The dashboard carries a backtest harness. It re-runs the projection at every historical point where there is enough data to run it, then compares it against the enrollment the district actually recorded.
That means the accuracy figures are measured rather than claimed, each variable is weighted by what the measurement showed instead of by preference, and an analyst on your staff can open the harness and check the work.
It also means we know where the model is weak — kindergarten is the noisiest year in any district, and the dashboard says so on the page rather than hiding it behind a single confident number.
A projection tells you what is coming. These tools turn it into a plan, and let you test that plan before anyone has to live with it.
And Tabletop Safety runs your emergency exercises on the same maps — the one place this stops being about enrollment.
Any district in the country, standing within 24 hours. One file — the fall membership report your state already publishes — is all it takes: your schools detect themselves from it and the demographics follow automatically.
After that it keeps itself current. When your state posts the next fall membership, the projection updates on its own.
In Virginia, your district is already built, so we just send you the link. Everywhere else, your state’s membership file is all we need. Either way we build it, you go play with it, and none of that requires meeting us first.
Print the brief, walk through the reasoning, and answer the follow-up question without scheduling a second meeting to go find the answer.
InteractiveGIS, Inc. has been building web mapping and data systems for cities, towns and counties since 2008, out of Blacksburg, Virginia. Local government is the only market we serve.
The projection model behind K12 Dashboard has been running since 2015. We rebuilt it so a district of four thousand students gets the same answer — at a price that makes sense for a district of four thousand students.
Tell us your district and we will build your five-year picture and send you the link to it — your schools, your grades, your numbers. No meeting required to look at it.
