Overview
| SGR = | number of students |
| number of residential dwelling units |
A student generation rate is the average number of students living in a particular type of residential unit for a given geography. It is used to estimate the number of public school students expected to live in a residential development.
For example, the student generation rates of the residential units below are:
The official student generation rates, updated biennially on July 1 of every odd-numbered calendar year, are established for each School Impact Area, by residential unit type (for multi-family housing types, only units in structures built since 1990 are considered). Since 2014, Montgomery County student generation rates have been calculated based on Montgomery County Public Schools’ official student enrollment and a housing dataset derived from the Maryland State Department of Assessments and Taxation (SDAT) property data. They are not estimates based on sample statistics but capture the county’s complete public school student population. The official rates are used to calculate the estimated impact of a residential development during the development review process, and to calculate school impact tax rates.
How does housing turnover impact student generation rates?
During the 2020 Growth and Infrastructure Policy (GIP) update effort, Montgomery Planning analyzed the student generation rates of single-family homes based on the year they were last sold, regardless of the year they were built. The graph below illustrates the finding that homes last sold in the past 15 years or so have noticeably higher student generation rates than the average rate of all single-family detached units. This supports the finding that the majority of enrollment growth in the county is coming from resident turnover of existing housing units. In the 2020 GIP update, Montgomery Planning found that 76.7% of the county’s public school enrollment growth was attributable to existing units. This also helps explain the ebb and flow of enrollment growth that many individual school service areas experience as residents in the surrounding neighborhoods turnover.