Enrollment, capacity and utilization: definitions

Enrollment

• October enrollment (membership).The number of students enrolled on the state’s Survey 2 count date in October, from the Florida Department of Education’s Membership by District and School by Gradefile for each year (2016-17 → 2025-26). It is a headcount, not a funding full-time equivalent, and it is not the first-day count the district announces in August (which runs several thousand students lower district-wide).
• Grade cells.The same file gives the count per grade. Where the state prints an asterisk (fewer than ten students), the cell is stored as suppressed, unless the numeric grade cells already add up to the school’s published total, in which case the asterisk marks a grade the school does not serve and is stored as zero.
• Federal copy. The NCES Common Core of Data publishes the same October count about eighteen months later; it is loaded only as an independent check (98.9% exactly equal across 1,533 school-years).
• Sectors. District-run= a K-12 general-education school that is not a charter, per the state’s Master School ID file; charter = any charter status code; other = alternative, special-education centers, virtual programs, juvenile-justice sites, adult and technical colleges. Charter and district flags agree across the state directory, the school-grades file and the federal directory for every school.

Capacity and utilization — three measures, kept apart

Three publishers print a “utilization” for the same building, with different numerators and denominators. The site stores each separately and never mixes them in one figure.

• Permanent FISH capacity— permanent satisfactory student stations in the state’s Florida Inventory of School Houses, from the FISH Level of Service report for Dade (2022-23 → 2024-25). School capacity in the same report adds relocatable classrooms.
• Utilization (headcount ÷ permanent capacity)— October enrollment divided by permanent FISH capacity for the same year. This is the measure the board’s Attendance Boundary Committee prints as “% Utilization Perm FISH Cap”, and the one used for every utilization figure on the analysis page. For 2025-26, where the state report is not yet published, the 2024-25 permanent capacity is carried forward (the derived load records how many schools used which fallback).
• Utilization, state measure (COFTE ÷ school capacity)— the percentage printed in the state report: capital-outlay full-time equivalent (a funding measure, not a headcount) divided by school capacity including relocatables. Verified to reproduce from the report’s own columns for every row. Correlation with the headcount measure across district-run schools in 2024-25: 0.926.
• County GIS capacity— the CAPACITY field of the county’s Public School layer. It equals permanent FISH capacity for 200 of the 326 schools that have both (61%; the first-fetch spot check of nine schools found seven); its ENROLLMNT field is a 2024-25 count. Stored under 2024-25 and used only as a fallback.

Spending and staffing

• Per-pupil expenditure, school-level — “School Costs Per Pupil, State, Local and Federal Funds” in the state’s ESSA per-pupil expenditure file (2021-22 → 2024-25). Total adds the district’s indirect costs allocated to the school. The denominator is the state’s; the site does not recompute it.
• Teachers (FTE) and students per teacher — from the NCES CCD school staff file (2023-24 only); the state publishes staff by district, not by school.

Board actions

The list of closures, consolidations, boundary changes and the August 2026 “reassessed” and “under review” designations is hand-entered from the board’s 2026-27 Attendance Zone Recommendations (final reading June 17, 2026, item D-67) and the district’s August 25, 2026 letters as reported by WLRN, NBC6 and the Pineapple Report; each row cites its document and page (school_events.csv). A designation is not a closure: the superintendent paused the review on September 2, 2026, with a decision targeted for December.

What the numbers cannot show

• Why enrollment fell at a given school. The state files give counts by grade, not where students went (charters, private schools with a scholarship, other counties, other countries); voucher counts exist only at the county level.
• Capacity for charter schools: the state inventory covers district-owned facilities.
• Building condition and capital spending per school (in the district facilities plan, not yet parsed).
• Anything after October 2025: the next state files arrive in the following school year.

Per-metric pages

Each served metric has its own page with the source file, loader, coverage and validation status: October enrollment, permanent capacity, utilization, per-pupil spending; the full catalogue is on the methodology page.

Evidence versions

Packet ceb90df13ffe generated 2026-09-16 21:37:06 UTC · full QA 93ea735c8bb9 (PASS) · packet JSON · check report · validation methodology

Corrections log

None yet. Corrections to published figures are recorded here with the date and the affected numbers.