Key facts
In short
The demographer predicts how many students the district will have. The current firm’s forecasts have been too high every year since 2023-24.2 The board uses them to decide where to build or close schools.
Why it matters to your tax bill: forecasts that run too high can lead to building schools before they are needed. Forecasts that run too low can leave schools crowded. The debt tax pays for them.
Related: enrollment forecasts · school capacity · charters · Oct. 2026 report · Open questions
Layer 1: What this office does
A demographer predicts how many students will live in each part of the district in future years. The board uses those forecasts, among other things, to decide where to build, close or expand schools, and how big a bond to ask for.
Layer 2: How it is checked
The forecasts are presented to the board in public each year. Anyone can compare last year’s forecast with this year’s actual count. See Enrollment forecasts.
- Rebid: every 5 years (one year plus four renewals). Last bid 2021: 2 firms, PASA scored 98.4 of 100, the other 62.4. The board item named no dollar amount.4
- Paid 2020-21 to 2025-26: $643,340. By year: $90,740, $98,000, $105,800, $113,300, $116,600 and $118,900.5 (Earlier counts of $595,908 and $570,748 were wrong: one included a voided check, and the local check list was missing some months of 2020-21.)
Questions to ask
- When will the board next bid the demographer contract?
- How does the district explain the gap between its forecasts and actual enrollment?
Changes to this page
- Nov. 2, 2026: Added questions to ask.
- Nov. 2, 2026: We checked every figure against its source. We reworded the other-side points so they stick to what the sources show.
What you can do or watch next
- Watch the next forecast and compare it with the actual count each fall.
What we still don’t know
- When the contract will next be bid (about 2026), and the yearly contract price.
- We do not know why the forecasts have run high. The district has not explained it in a public document we found.
Layer 3: The record
- The forecasts the district planned with have been above actual enrollment each year since 2023-24. (One staff option for 2026-27, 40,794, came in under the 41,143 counted.) Our estimate: about 68% of Leander-area students at charter schools (where grade data exist) are in kindergarten through 5th grade. This comes from each campus’s grade mix; it is not a count of students who left.2
- About 7,760 empty elementary seats are expected in 2036-37, against 1,775 seats over capacity at crowded schools.3 See School capacity.
The district’s side
The firm gives a low, a middle and a high case each year. In its newest study it lists reasons for its misses, such as fewer homes built than it expected. See enrollment forecasts.
Numbers marked “our math” are our estimates, not official figures. The notes show the inputs and the steps.
Footnotes
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Board packet Oct. 23, 2025, p.100 (PASA slide 37) (packet). ↩ ↩2
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District enrollment forecasts vs. actual counts: 2024-25, 43,316 vs. 42,608; 2025-26, 42,448 vs. 41,862; 2026-27, 41,841 vs. 41,143. 2025-26 charter estimate: about 1,744 of 2,568 students. The K-5 share is our estimate from campus grade mix (estimate). Method: each charter campus’s K-5 share applied to its Leander-area students; campuses without grade data are left out. ↩ ↩2 ↩3
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Our math from PASA’s Oct. 29, 2026 elementary table: 17,213 students in 25,157 seats in 2026-27 (17,213 ÷ 25,157 = 68.4%); in 2036-37, seats left empty at some schools add to 7,760 and students over capacity at others add to 1,775. ↩ ↩2
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Leander ISD check register, fiscal 2020-21 to 2025-26, voided lines removed; 2024-25 and 2025-26 re-checked at the district’s posted files. ↩