Downloaded today, December 8th, from the Cornell Program on Applied Demographics, is our problem (click for enlarged view):
As you can see, our school has been shrinking...but Cornell thinks that our shrinkage has pretty much reached an end, for the next several years. I don't know that they're including our currently most-since-1997 elementary enrollment or the Colgate-funded expansion of the nursery school, but I look at that graph and I think: that's a problem, yes. (At least it's a problem for the kind of school we now have, which I expect to be drastically modified in the next decade or two but not right now.) It's a problem. Are we desperate? No. Will we become desperate? We don't know...the graph doesn't go that far into the future, but we're sort-of-okay for a while. Do we have time to work on alternatives which (unlike the currently proposed merger) would actually save money? Yes.
And of course some of those alternatives would be mergers, possibly with Morrisville-Eaton under different circumstances (as I've proposed before) or possibly not -- or possibly with a couple of other schools at once, as Stanley Roe was reminding us in his letter to the Mid-York Weekly this week. None of those merger proposals would make me bubble over with happiness, but if they saved money, if they saved money in the long run, then I would almost certainly stop fussing with this blog.
same-day update: Carolyn looks more carefully and is confident that the recent expansion data is not included, so the graph should probably be given an uptick. Separately, Ken points out that if you go to the Cornell source and check the Madison and Morrisville-Eaton districts, you find that Madison's predicted to have more stable enrollment than M-E. Indeed, we should keep the whole region in mind for all the plans we consider, and I wasn't. Thanks!
And of course some of those alternatives would be mergers, possibly with Morrisville-Eaton under different circumstances (as I've proposed before) or possibly not -- or possibly with a couple of other schools at once, as Stanley Roe was reminding us in his letter to the Mid-York Weekly this week. None of those merger proposals would make me bubble over with happiness, but if they saved money, if they saved money in the long run, then I would almost certainly stop fussing with this blog.
same-day update: Carolyn looks more carefully and is confident that the recent expansion data is not included, so the graph should probably be given an uptick. Separately, Ken points out that if you go to the Cornell source and check the Madison and Morrisville-Eaton districts, you find that Madison's predicted to have more stable enrollment than M-E. Indeed, we should keep the whole region in mind for all the plans we consider, and I wasn't. Thanks!
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