School closings can be made more acceptable to a community if a long-range plan for dealing with declining enrollments is developed that includes a statement of goals, process, criteria, and efforts to include public information and interaction. (Author/MLF)

Published in conjuction with a planning assistance manual (EA008692), this case study examines the impact of declining enrollment on one suburban Minnesota school district. To cope with enrollment decline, the district sought to maintain a balanced budget and to preserve as nearly as possible its existing educational programs. It also sought…

Information is presented from a study by the Council of New Jersey State College Locals to get facts on budgets, enrollments, New Jersey, the nation, and trends over the last decade in order to help the citizens of New Jersey determine what policies will best meet their needs in the 1990s. In June of 1987, the Chancellor submitted a Five-Year…

A step-by-step procedure, defined to help the Hamden Public Schools (Connecticut) board of education with the task of choosing one or more elementary schools to close, develops a list of criteria used for comparing and ranking elementary schools into a working system intended to give a precise, objective structure to the board's decision-making…

Various techniques used by state agencies, secondary schools, community colleges, and large universities to forecast enrollments are described and guidelines for constructing forecasting procedures are outlined. The forecasting techniques are divided into three categories: (1) quantitative techniques based on historical data that attempt curve…

Enrollment decline is a problem in the majority of Minnesota's school districts. Declining enrollment means that school administrators must plan for the financial difficulties arising from cutting budgets, reducing staff, closing buildings, and ending programs. Written to stimulate effective planning for declining enrollment, this manual…

Four documents and seven journal articles on the management of enrollment decline, selected from those recently made available through the ERIC system, are described briefly in this report. Topics covered in the items listed include what can be done at the state level, suggestions for projecting enrollment, how instructional space is being…

Declines in student population are a fact of life in most of the nation's school districts. With the declines come unprecedented challenges and opportunities; sensitive community relations problems involved with school closings; costs that continue to rise despite the decline in student numbers; the need for staff reductions; the need for…

Declining enrollment in Minnesota schools is the subject of this collection of five case studies and one planning manual. The information in the manual and in the case studies of representative school districts is published together to provide persons interested in overall state policy with examples in enough detail to provide a sense of what is…

The impact of demographic shifts and enrollment declines for higher education are examined, and possible institutional responses to these problems are studied. After a review of the national statistics and projections of future enrollment trends, attention is directed to the campus level and the dimensions of current enrollment problems. Based on…