Like, we can't say, well, we just won't do an audit this year, right? Because if we don't do the audit, we won't get federal or state funds. We can't choose to not report to OCR, uh, the Office of Civil Rights, right? Like so there's all these statistical things we have to do and there's all these state specific requirements for reporting and all of our funding is dependent on it. So, you know, it's it's always interesting and somewhat entertaining to me in a perverse way that you'll hear people at the legislature say, "Well, the problem is they have all those darned administrators." And yet, a good percentage of those darned administrators that we have, we have because the legislature puts continually adds more and more requirements on school districts and unfortunately does not comatately add more and more funding for the school districts to cover those costs.
But part of a um an SOFG aligned resource process is to constantly be looking at those measures. So we keep an eye on our admin cost uh and ensure that that's not creeping up uh inappropriately. Um we make sure that we stay within a certain percentage of of admin if we're specifically talking about admin. Um but also operationally uh it is a constant conversation with my operational directors um that we're looking at uh structure and determining if there's more efficient ways to process things. I think we've just been very successful in the finance office for sure. Um but also in our food service department, we recently uh rolled out uh and we had gotten some questions on anou to work with another child nutrition software group. Um not to say that we're unhappy with ours, but we see that there might be some value in building a system that actually is is uh collaborate a collaboration with child nutrition staff.
And so we're kind of excited about this um relationship with Apollo. It doesn't mean that we're going to switch to them or use them. Um, but they will be built based on input and um, uh, collaboration with actual CH people in the field as opposed to a system that was built by people who think they know what we need. Apollo is trying to make a system that actually fulfills what we need based on our comments and and input. So, that's what that um,ou was uh, about. And again, it doesn't mean we're going to do it, but if we did, uh, we would actually be able to join that um, and utilize that system at a greatly discounted price because we were willing to jump in and be a part of the, uh, the conversations. So, we're looking for those types of opportunities as much as we can um, in all of the areas, and all of the operational areas.
Um but we'll get into you know some more of that stuff but um you can see that with the items that we bring to the board. So we have EV buses. Um that's an energy efficiency process uh progress pro so sorry project. Uh there's a lot of layers to that. We have um developed uh HVAC systems, HVAC systems that we um got tax rebates for and it's going to save us I can't remember exactly how many millions but I do have that in the presentation. So these are just some of the layers of operational decisions but again one of the biggest driving factors in our budget is enrollment. So we have to really dig deep into enrollment and understand what's happening to our families and our households and our community. And so, uh, one of the ways that we do that is through a demographers's report.
Um, again, this is another thing that you want to do on a regular basis so you can kind of stay on top of changes. The demographers report is not intended to be exactly um on point or correct with the with the like I've had people say, well, the demographer said we were going to have 4,500 kids this year and we have 43. They were wrong. No, what they're doing is looking at trends and gathering information we don't have access to and putting it into one report as an additional tool for us to utilize along with our other tools. So, this um demog demographic and enrollment analysis update. Um this is just a uh the summary of it that we wanted to have ready for our meet and confer conversations. And so this uh takes the main report which is in the documents that we gave you access to um and and kind of has that highlevel summary of the impacts that they're seeing in our district.
Uh what's really nice about this is it does break it down into the grade level characteristics. So, uh, when we're talking about impacts in certain areas like third grade or eighth grade, this is one of those reports that can help us, uh, in alignment to direct our resources to those most impacted groups. Um, it also allows us to take a look at where our kids are coming from and where our kids are going and, uh, some of those characteristics of our our community. uh where are are the housing where's the housing market going? What are new developments looking like? Um and they have some really far out ability to see where developers are going to be developing and um and some of those enrollment projections. So they plan our demographics based on these grids so that our attendance boundaries don't affect it. um it remains unchanged over time.
So, it allows us to have some more consistent information. Trend analysis is very important when you're looking at this type of data. Here's our headcount. Uh enrollment it's talking again that's that trend as Katie pointed out. it. I mean, I would say there's good dips in there uh especially uh for 2526 which we did realize. So, enrollment uh as you take a look at this has declined every year. Um they average less than 2%. You were asking about the percentage and that is a percentage that's in my budget work. Um obviously the pandemic has its own effect and that makes budgeting uh looking at those historical trends pretty difficult. Um and since then our uh average losses have elevated to about 4%. So, uh, at the time the demographer pulled this report, um, >> so that 2010, and this is something Miss Shapiro actually dug into, if you recall, was SP 1070.
That's right. >> So, you'll see you'll see a consistency of experience to the recent sudden drop and the sudden drop that we experienced in 2010. Gotcha. Okay. come um and this the demographer doesn't have access they have access to the data at the time we we've given it to them and so uh these were some of our projection numbers uh we realized more than a 6% uh decline in our student enrollment this year this is really interesting um the out how do I make it so you can see the whole slide wait is it that nope >> well you could Open it with the P. Just click on Yeah. Open. No. Um download. Sorry. Go back. >> Okay. No. >> No. >> Just go back to that tab. You have it right there. >> Right here. >> Um you should be able to down. See the arrow going down into the all the way on the left.
There's page five of 13. Right next to that. >> I see. >> Download it. And then Yeah, >> it'll come up better. >> Um now you got to open it. There we go. >> Oh yeah. Okay, let's see if that gets the whole thing on the screen. >> And then you can just adjust the view. >> You might be able to do F11 for full screen mode. >> I just want you to be able to see the whole trend and the words. Um so on this out of district enrollment, this is something that's kind of interesting that came out in this this most recent uh demography report is that in addition to our in district open enrollment. So we would expect our in district open enrollment to be in decline because our students are in decline. Uh but uh in the past our outofd district enrollment stayed pretty steady coming in from outside of our district boundaries.
we're uh realizing a decline in that out of district enrollment. Uh so we're starting to see that that decline is happening in those other areas and less people are coming in from outside our boundaries uh to come into our schools and um that can be impactful. Uh we do have some strategies as we've uh been digging into this. So, we lost about 170 out of district students this year versus 120 internal district students. >> You said 107. Okay. >> 170. Okay. Sorry. >> Um, here's where we start digging into the enrollment by those grade cohorts. Uh, projections for enrollment each year. So we would move kindergarten to first, first to second, second to third, eighth comes off, and then we have projections on where we think kindergarten is going to come in. So the sixth to eighth grade cohort is the largest, but not uh more different.
It's not significantly different than the others, but K2 has not declined significantly faster since 23 uh 223. So we're a little different. We're we what this tells me is we are more successful at bringing the kindergarteners and then the younger age students into our district based on the different um programs that we have. We have a lot of preschools in our district which I think helps to contribute to this. We're very preschool friendly. uh we offer um you know facilities used to some of the preschools so that we can partner with them and when they're on our campuses what we've seen is a big high success of them coming into our schools. So this is one of those um practices that we use to mitigate declining enrollment. Declining enrollment is going to happen no matter what we're doing because birth rates have gone down. Housing costs are really high in our district which makes it a struggle to bring families in um in the district itself.
those housing costs are kind of prohibitive. It's prohibitive to our teachers and to our families. So, what we're seeing is an increase of um older people coming into our district to purchase these homes who either have children who have already aged out or they're retirees and don't have kids. And I love us having this information, but one of the things that I also want us to push a little bit further is that we know that we're in a declining school district and for the next 10 years, it looks like we're going to decline even more, right? Mhm. >> So I guess the questions are instead of us mitigating that loss year after year is what are some of the interventions that we're doing whether that's contraction whether that's other things like what what does that look like because we you know we know that we're declining and that's not going to change unless you know something miraculously happens.
So, >> and I think because we're in a study session, I'll I'll feel more comfortable um doing it in the in the enrollment part. Let me go back and talk about >> Well, I was also going to make a comment about the demographic trends really quick. >> I'd be really curious to see these demographic trends um subtracting the portion of the district that's north of Indian School Road. >> Sure. cuz I have a feeling that skews things a bit in what from our reality >> and and some of that >> how many students are attending our schools like you know what I'm saying like in terms of when we're talking about the number of homeowners 55 plus >> has declined sure maybe I'm curious about these demographic trends on this on this sheet without that portion of the district and I'm just curious >> this is very summary I'm sorry Jay and I also have the full report available to the board.
I just felt this was a better one to do, too. And you can get that type of information >> and and be able to dig in a little deeper um school by school and by area. >> And all I was going to say is the gentrification has continued to move south. So I while what you're saying is likely true, I don't think it's as much of a skew as it was 10 years ago because what we're seeing is a lot of homes that our families used to live in being torn out even south of um even south of Thomas at this point where those homes are being removed and expensive condos are going in their place and the people who are moving into those condos are not families with six kids. their um totally older retirees and whatnot. >> It's just we've always had that I mean we've always had that section and not even maybe south of Indian school but north of Stanford or north of the canal that's just feels like no man's land for our district seems like it's there serving no purpose other than to give us tax dollars which we're grateful for all of their money up there in Paradise Valley.
Vanessa, do you have >> the numbers on people living in the district with school age children who are using ESA vouchers who are sending their kids to schools and like Madison or even charter schools? I mean, do we have that? >> We do have some information on where uh kids are going if they're going out to some of the charters. If they're selecting a private school though, we don't have as much. But what we can see is how many kids are in our district and what percentage of capture rate do we have. So >> you say in our district, you mean >> in our attendance boundaries living in our district. >> Living in our attendance boundaries and the demographers report goes pretty deeply into the students that are available to capture and uh who's going out and who's coming in. So there are more details of uh but whether they're using an a voucher or not, we're not able to we're not able to determine that with this type of data, but you can kind of make a presumption of it.
Um and so as we're looking at where the market's going and what is building, we are building. So that's great. You know, we've gone through some periods of time where building slowed or stopped. Uh so there are new developments going and unfortunately those are mostly multifamily homes and those don't tend to give us as many students. Um but also a part of the capture rate that we were just discussing uh in the past Kraton had up to an 80% capture rate of the students within our attendance boundaries and right now we're hovering about 60%. So when we're talking about mitigation, it's looking at this type of data, getting that type of information, and then having those conversations of what can we do uh to capture not only more of the population within our boundaries, but as we saw, we are very much supported by students coming from outside of our district to um participate in our programs.
So what can we do to elevate that since we're seeing a drop in that area? That's a big concern. Um we're having discussions right now of a expanded uh transportation program um and what that could potentially look like. Part of the conversation that has happened so far in committee and some of the things that we we've been taking to meet confer uh we know that our excellencia start time is causing some negative effects on our our staff uh and families where they can't participate in uh some of the afterchool things. Uh it's very late for students. there's been um pretty big voice on wanting to get that it up to uh our other schools and not be such an outlier. So that kind of generated this conversation about transportation. Um in order to do something like that, if that ends up being um what the committees recommend and what the surveys support, we would need to expand our transportation.
So, since we're already looking at an expansion for a solution, uh one of the ideas that came up in committee was what if uh with open enrollment, you have to transport your kids uh yourself. It's a big commitment. Those are very involved parents. Um they're great parents to have. Uh one of the things that we thought with seeing that decline in those out of district students was to create hubs outside of our boundaries, especially if we could target areas where there's school closures in other districts. you have parents who are looking for options and solutions and Kraton's a great solution. So, a part of that pilot could include um making our transportation. We have buses in our district from other districts all the time. Um a lot of this is through McKenna Vento. Uh there's some legal requirement that you have to bus them. Um, but we were looking at a more strategic plan to create hubs outside of our district that would allow those out of enrollment parents to come to one place, not have to come all the way in and know that their kids could get bus to the school of choice.
So, um, that would do a lot of things for us. Um, it also would reduce some congestion at our schools and things like that. So there's a lot of ideas uh especially when we see these types of uh demographer reports and which key students that we are losing. Um that helps to guide some of the conversations in committees and this is that thing we were just talking about. This is the u school age population and service rate. So this is the kids um who are in our boundaries that we service and then the kids who are outside. So you can see that blue is the outside uh or no blue is the school age population. That service rate is of the school age population how many students are coming into our district. And that's that purple line. So there's a a capture rate there. Um, and we think that perhaps expanded transportation and a shuttle-like service within our district could potentially uh recapture some of that 60% and bump that number up.
So, we're looking at um strategies that will need to be community uh communicated out to our community, getting that input from the community if they feel that these would be strategies that would help them make choices to come to Kraton schools. >> Do we Again, I'm going back to the geographic stuff. Do we know if this is different in different like is this drastically different in northern part of the district versus the southern part of the district? >> Which part drastic >> as in like how many kids that are school age children are choosing to not go to school in our district that live in our district? >> I can dig into that data. It is absolutely there. I just don't know that I've specifically looked at the data in that way. But if you're wanting to get a little deeper dive into the dem demographers report, I can for sure take a look at what's there and answer those questions.