What you need to know
Bob Templeton, a demographer with Zonda Education, said April 15 that the district's enrollment growth is still projected to be around 500 students in the coming school year. While he presented projections for future school years, he said the anticipated opening of a new charter school in the area, Harmony Science Academy Georgetown, planned for next fall may impact what the district can expect in the future, but it is unclear how much.
He said this is due to ongoing housing growth in the area, which is concentrated in a few subdivisions under construction throughout the Georgetown community. Data collected from the fourth quarter of 2023 shows high inflation is still holding interest rates and home prices high, but that a large supply of both single and multifamily housing is being churned out locally.
The highest concentration of these newly constructed homes are located within attendance zones for Wolf Ranch and Williams Elementary schools, he said.
A closer look
Templeton will be able to provide projections for the potential impact of the new charter school on the district's enrollment in May, he said, but cautioned that the forecast for the 2025-26 school year might look different once the new charter school has been established.
"I know that the Harmony charter school has broken ground, and they will likely be hoping to get that building operational for fall of 2025," Templeton said. "We will be exploring that impact and will provide an update on the projections in the next couple of months. Our charter school research as a whole is what we do in the spring, so it will be a part of the first quarter report that will be available in early May."
Looking back
In November, Templeton assured the district that they would not be the only district impacted by the opening of Harmony's Georgetown campus.
"It's not going to pull all of its kids from Georgetown," Templeton said. "It'll likely be pulling from Round Rock. It will have an impact to some degree. We'll want to time that and understand when it's going to become operational of course at the campus level."
