Zonda Demographics provides enrollment projections for roughly 100 school districts in Texas, according to data from the company. Rocky Gardiner, the company's director of school district consulting, said the company produces both short-term and long-term projections, up to 10 years.
Some of Zonda's North Texas clients include:
- Denton ISD
- Coppell ISD
- Plano ISD
- Richardson ISD
- Dallas ISD
The details
Gardiner said district leaders use the short-term, one-year projections to guide staffing and budget planning, and long-term projections to plan when to open or close a school.
“We have the technology to help them see what it looks like if a school gets closed or a school gets added with how that impacts their enrollment going forward,” Gardiner said.
Several school districts, including Carroll ISD, McKinney ISD and Keller ISD, announced school closures in the last year. Zonda’s enrollment projections show declining enrollment in all three districts, according to each district’s demographic reports. Denton ISD and Argyle ISD both plan to open new schools over the next few years, and Zonda’s demographic reports show growth in those two districts over the next 10 years.
“Every year [school districts] need to know what's happening, good or bad,” Gardiner said.
Zooming in
Predicting school enrollment has become more complicated since COVID-19 due to more school options such as virtual schools, homeschooling and charter schools, Gardiner said.
Gardiner started doing enrollment projections in 2006, when he founded Templeton Demographics with Bob Templeton. Templeton told Community Impact that their original method for projecting enrollment was based on new housing developments. After 2020, housing became a much less reliable indicator of student enrollment.
"We started to see the breakdown in the methodology, where it wasn't as high of a correlation between the housing and the enrollment around the 2020 year of the pandemic," Templeton said.
Before 2020, the development patterns showed an average of about six new public school students per 10 new homes built, but that number has dropped, Gardiner said.
“A school district that was yielding 0.6 students [per household] is now yielding 0.4,” Gardiner said.
After schools went online during COVID-19, predicting enrollment got more difficult as more parents chose to homeschool and enroll in virtual school, Gardiner said.
“It's gotten harder, not as straightforward because we've got a lot of mobility in the state,” Gardiner said. “Whether it's school choice, parents decide to homeschool, charter campuses, private schools and virtual has now emerged. That's probably the most significant thing impacting school districts right now.”
To track the enrollment changes, Zonda uses U.S. Census Bureau and Texas Education Agency data, as well as the districts' respective internal enrollment history to calculate how many students live in the district but don’t attend its public schools.
“Knowing how many kids are going to the virtual school is a good thing, but then trying to project how many will go next year, or the next year, is where it gets hard,” Gardiner said.
Zooming out
In addition to projecting school enrollment, Zonda also tracks homebuilding and advises developers and financial institutions on where to buy land and build houses, Gardiner said. The company website shows its clients include Wells Fargo, D.R. Horton and KB Home.
A May news release from real estate services company CoStar Group states it acquired Zonda for $800 million, with the deal set to close in the second half of 2026.
