HSE Demographics and Out-of-District Student Transfer Proposal

At the January 22, 2025 HSE School Board Meeting, MCKIBBEN DEMOGRAPHIC RESEARCH, LLC, provided a population and enrollment forecast through the 2034-35 school year. The full report and presentation can be found HERE from the January 22nd meeting.

The results are quite detailed and we are only going to provide an overview of the data and some of the key findings. This is a chart of past, current (red) and projected student populations. As you can see, the 10-year prediction is for the number of students to decline with time.

From the executive summary, a number of reasons are given for this prediction. We have selected a few to provide some of the salient issues:

• The Hamilton Southeastern School Corporation will experience modest population growth and slight enrollment decline over the next 10 years. This is primarily due to a growing elderly population, an increase in empty nest housing stock, and relatively large 12th grade cohorts leaving the school system and the area.

• The resident total fertility rate for the Hamilton Southeastern School Corporation over the life of the forecasts is below replacement level (1.79 vs. the replacement level of 2.1).

• The primary factors causing the Hamilton Southeastern School Corporation enrollment to decrease over the next 10 years is the increase in empty nest households in the district, the relatively low number of elderly housing units turning over, and continued low number of births.

Should these projections hold (the previous demographic studies were quite accurate), HSE will have to make some hard decisions in the future because loss of students equals loss of state funding.

At the present time, HSE states HERE it has seats available in various schools equal to about 646 students. HSE gets about $6,800/student from the state so that represents $4.4M dollars lost if they are not filled. WTHR reported HERE that Superintendent Mapes said that HSE could accept up to 850 students, but the current lottery is for the 646 seats in selected schools (see the above HSE link).

The new policy was approved at the February 12, 2025, board meeting. There was the second reading of a HSE Policy entitled, “Residency Requirements.” J03.02. The new policy notes that HSE has the authority to accept students from outside of the district and sets out procedures and a timeline to determine the number of students HSE can accept and where they could be placed.

HSE is looking to fill existing openings by building, grade and room and not to move existing students around to facilitate the transfers. The best way to look at this situation is a large matrix of schools, grade levels and classrooms where there are shortfalls in a slot to be filled. The out-of-district parents will have to apply to the HSE website for a transfer.

There are strict criteria for accepting an application for out-of-district transfer. Issues that will deny a transfer are listed. To summarize, a transfer student must be in good standing per Indiana State criteria. Students of HSE employees will be accepted before any other requests for student transfers. If there is not adequate capacity in a grade level to cover the applications, a random drawing will be conducted. Parents of the out-of-district transfer students are responsible for the transportation.