Pasco dashboard shows housing shift, rising voucher use and a projected enrollment shortfall that will affect next year’s budget

Pasco County Schools staff presented a new dashboard showing multi-year housing-growth patterns and used that analysis to frame a discussion about declining traditional enrollment, steady charter growth and a sharp rise in Florida Empowerment Scholarship (FES) use.

District demographer Mr. Williams showed a heat map of building-permit-derived school-impact fees and said neighborhood growth has shifted since 2018 from the SR-54 corridor into Wesley Chapel, Epperson Ranch and other eastern/central parts of the county. Williams also presented enrollment-growth figures: traditional-school growth peaked coming out of the COVID years and has fallen sharply; this year traditional growth was fewer than 300 students while FES growth was roughly 2,000 students, the presentation said.

Budget and projections: finance staff said the district recorded a net reduction of 1,544 students (third calculation) that removed about $13.5 million from this fiscal-year funding and that the state’s proration reduced roughly $5.9 million. For the coming year the district used a conservative House bill scenario that projects a further decline of 664 traditional students, a projected funding reduction of about $5.8 million under that scenario. “We are projecting a negative 664,” Mr. Williams said.

Allocation implications: budget staff said allocations were set using the same formula as prior years but that recent overbudgeting (the district had budgeted for roughly 1,700–1,800 students in some allocations) combined with the expected decline produces the equivalent of about 2,200 fewer students to fund across schools, with cascading reductions in staffing and support. “We essentially over allocated, or over budgeted by about 1,500 students, for the current year,” Mr. Shibley said in the presentation.

Why it matters: district funding and staff allocations are tied to student counts. Staff said the expiration of ESSER funds, higher fixed costs (health insurance, Florida Retirement System changes, utilities, tariffs) and uncertain state budgeting raise the risk that allocations and staffing must be adjusted to match lower student counts.

Vouchers, homeschool and tracking limits: staff and board members discussed limits to tracking scholarship and homeschool students. The district said current state data do not allow the district to track all scholarship recipients after they leave the district; pending legislation that would assign state IDs to voucher students could improve tracking. Staff also estimated there are about 5,700 registered homeschool students in the county but said it is unknown how many of those accept scholarship funds.

What staff proposed next: continue multi-year data reviews, refine allocation decisions, run the budget once state law and funding are finalized, and examine grant strategies and other mitigations. Staff said they will return with detailed budget worksheets once Tallahassee finalizes the state budget.