School District Reviews Report on Demographics and Projected School Enrollment

What are the trends for the Scarsdale Schools population and what are projections for the next five years?

At the February 5, 2024 meeting of the Board of Education, Assistant Superintendent Meghan Troy reviewed a report for the Scarsdale Schools from Statistical Forecasting LLC that provided both demographic information about the population and enrollment trends for the district’s seven schools.

Here are some topline observations about the composition of our population and enrollment is going in the next five years. See the entire report here:

Overall Enrollment

Enrollments (K-12) in the Scarsdale Public Schools were fairly stable through 2019-20 before declining in 2020-21 and 2021-22 due to the coronavirus pandemic. However, enrollments rebounded in 2022-23 and 2023-24 as students returned to the school district. While total enrollments are projected to increase in the next five years, the gain is not projected to occur uniformly across the elementary, middle, and high school grade configurations. In the elementary and middle school grades, enrollment gains are projected while an enrollment decline is projected at Scarsdale High School.

Enrollment projections were computed for a five-year period, 2024-25 through 2028-29. To provide a range for future enrollments, two sets of projections were computed based on four and five years of historical enrollments.

In both projections, enrollments are projected to increase throughout the projection period. In the first projection, enrollment is projected to be 4,846 in 2028-29, which would be a gain of 143 students from the 2023-24 enrollment of 4,703. In the second projection, enrollment is projected to be 4,889 in 2028-29, which would be a gain of 186 students from the 2023-24 enrollment.

Racial Composition

The report says, “while Whites are the largest race in the Scarsdale Public Schools attendance area, their population is declining. In the 2020 Census, 67.2% of the population was White as compared to 79.7% in 2010, which is a loss of 12.5 percentage points. Asians were the second-largest race at 20.7% in 2020, which is a gain of 7.8 percentage points from the 2010 percentage (12.9%). Hispanics were the third-largest race, consisting of 5.1% of the population in 2020.”

Nativity

Regarding nativity, 24.0% of residents are foreign-born, which is similar to that of Westchester County (25.7%). China and India are the largest sources, accounting for 22.1% and 9.7%, respectively, of the foreign-born population.

Home Sales

Home sales peaked in 2002 at 279 sales before declining to 142 in 2008 due to the banking and financial crises. Beginning in 2009, the number of sales steadily increased through 2021 before reversing trend. In 2021, there were 353 home sales, which was the highest number during the historical period. However, the number of sales declined to 205 in 2023, which is likely due to the increase in mortgage interest rates.

Private School Enrollments

The number of resident students from Scarsdale who attended non-public schools was tabulated from 2018-19 through 2022-23, a five-year period. Data were not yet available for 2023-24. The number of non-public students (K-12) has increased from 380 in 2018-19 to 487 in 2022-23, a gain of 107 students. In the last five years, the percentage of Scarsdale resident students attending non- public schools has slowly increased from 7.4% in 2018-19 to 9.4% in 2022-23, a gain of 2.0 percentage points.

Enrollment by School

Projected enrollments for the five elementary schools, the middle school and the high school are as follows:

The Edgewood Elementary School population is expected to grow anywhere from 67 to 83 students.

The Fox Meadow Elementary School population is expected to grow from 50 to 71 students.

The Greenacres Elementary School population is expected to grow from 31 to 41 students.

The Heathcote Elementary School population to expected to fall by 16 students or go up by 15 students.

The population of Quaker Ridge Elementary School to decline 11 to 41 students.

Enrollment at Scarsdale Middle School is projected to gain 76 to 79 students.

The enrollment at Scarsdale High School is expected to decline by 53 to 63 students.