Iowa City schools may look to consultants for data

IOWA CITY – The Iowa City school board is considering hiring consultants to provide data to help make decisions on divisive topics like school boundaries and building new schools.

The school board, meeting as the Facilities Committee Tuesday, heard from three vendors offering tools on enrollment projections, building capacities and attendance areas.

The vendors were invited by Superintendent Stephen Murley to give board members an idea of what possibilities are out there.

He said certain information is needed to make data-based decisions. Some of the big issues confronting the district in recent years, like whether to build another high school and redistricting, often bring emotional responses from the public.

Murley is not recommending the board hire any of the vendors he brought Tuesday. At the Aug. 21 Facilities Committee meeting, he'll ask members if they agree with him that this is the type of data the district should have. If so, a request for proposals would go out to attract interested companies.

Sarah Kemp of the Applied Population Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison said her organization can provide enrollment projections up to 10 years out with an analysis down to the attendance-zone level. The projections are accurate to within 1 to 3 percent up to five years out, she said.

The work would take several months and cost  between $8,000 to more than $24,000, depending on the scope of the project, she said.

Board member Tuyet Dorau asked how that work is different from projections provided for years by the University of Iowa Geography Department. Murley said it's not much different, but some community members have questioned the validity of those numbers and this would provide a second opinion. He also said administrators have some concerns with the length of time it takes to get the UI data.

The UI under-projected enrollment by 1.9 percent two years ago and 3.9 percent last year, according to the latest demographic report.

Decatur, Ill.-based BLDD Architects discussed how it can calculate the “educational adequacy” of school buildings and the life-cycle costs for each building over a period of time, like 30 years, to get a cost/benefit ratio. It allows for different scenarios to be compared.

The work would cost at least $120,000.

And finally, Eagan, Minn.-based Guide K12 presented its application that allows officials to get detailed information on students from the district level to attendance zones to neighborhoods to a single house. It lets a district explore different scenarios, like closing a school and shifting students around.

A district can limit who has access to certain information, Guide K12's Carey Charboneau.

His company charges $2.25 per student annually for the service. The Iowa City school district's certified enrollment last school year was 12,405 students.