Richland 1 forecast: enrollment largely stable over next decade despite major housing projects
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Summary
MGT consultants told the Richland 1 School Board on March 31 that districtwide enrollment is projected to remain largely stable over the next 5–10 years, with localized increases tied to nearly 7,600 planned housing units; consultants cautioned that birth-rate declines and utilization imbalances will require planning.
At a March 31 Richland 1 School Board work session, consultants from MGT told board members that districtwide student enrollment is expected to stay roughly stable over the next decade while pockets of residential development will produce localized increases.
"There was a decrease of 535 students from 2024," Cameron Arsenault, a demographer with MGT, said during the presentation, summarizing recent enrollment trends the study used as its baseline. Using one year of current student data and three years of historical records, MGT geocoded students into 399 study areas and ran forecasts at that granular level, Arsenault said.
The consultants stressed that small shifts in birth rates and mobility can offset or amplify development-driven growth. Arsenault said birth-rate-based kindergarten cohorts show a small downward trend (for example, a cohort moving from about 2,460 births to 2,132 in a later cohort), and that mobility factors — the historical rate at which cohorts move from grade to grade or transfer in/out — are applied to project each cohort forward.
MGT said it identified 7,556 planned new housing units inside district boundaries, including about 5,242 single-family detached homes and roughly 2,000 multi-unit residences. Using district-specific yield factors, the consultants estimated about 0.403 students per new single-family home, 0.23 per apartment unit and 0.611 for affordable housing tied to developments by the Columbia Housing Authority.
"If you had 100 kindergarten students in the Columbia High School area with a mobility rate of 0.99, that would translate into 99 first graders," Arsenault said, explaining how mobility factors change cohort size year to year.
Despite the new housing pipeline, the district’s net projection shows only modest change: MGT projected the district’s resident student totals would be ‘‘relatively stable’’ across the 5–10 year window, with a projected increase in middle-school enrollment (roughly 4,600 to 4,800) but slight declines in elementary and high school cohorts. A district official noted that MGT’s forecast (21,313 students forecast for 2025–26) closely matched the district’s March 23 headcount of 21,319, a congruence the consultants said lent validity to their methods.
Consultants cautioned that charter-school openings and other neighborhood-level changes are difficult to predict precisely; MGT said charter impacts are handled indirectly through observed mobility but added that a new charter in a neighborhood would require an updated forecast.
Board members asked several follow-up questions about local examples (for instance, the Flora attendance area) and how yield and phasing of large subdivisions affect projections. MGT recommended updating the demographic forecast every 3–5 years, or sooner if major development timelines accelerate, to capture phasing and changing mobility.
The board said the demographic data will inform Vision 2030 discussions and budget planning, and that the district will make MGT’s slides and data available via board docs and the live stream.
