St Louis Transfer Student Statistics - I Love Numbers!


Today the stltoday site had an article that gave the latest tallies of where all the students from Normandy and Riverview Gardens want to transfer throughout the St. Louis and St. Charles county school districts, with a very detailed spreadsheet in a PDF. I found all of the numbers pretty interesting. I found it quite interesting how different the choices and numbers were for the two unaccredited districts, and I made a pretty graph from the numbers as well (sorted by total number of transfers, combining Normandy and RG numbers).

Both districts had Clayton as their third most popular choice, but with 139 total requests there (96 for Normandy and 43 for RG) that is equivalent to 5.6% of the students for Clayton's district of 2,500 students. The other districts selected varied substantially. Nearby Ritenour, for example, is the second most popular district in Normandy with 122 transfer requests, but only 7 from Riverview. Hazelwood is almost exactly the reverse with 113 from Riverview and only 7 from Normandy. The only district besides Clayton with more than 40 transfers from both districts is Ferguson Florissant with 146 from RG and 43 from Normandy. Its 189 total transfers is the third highest total tally behind the "free" transportation districts, Francis Howell (326) and Mehlville (476). With over 11,000 total students in the Ferg-Flor district, however, that amounts to just a little over 1% of their student population so hopefully that will not make too big of a problem for them.

One interesting trend in the numbers is that 9th grade tends to be the most popular grade for transfers. For Ferguson-Florissant, for example, that would mean 10+18=28 new incoming freshmen into their high schools. For Mehlville it would be 77 new freshmen (the largest incoming transfer class in any district) which is 3 or 4 new classrooms full of students. Not surprisingly the lowest number of transfers by grade level is high school seniors. Who would want to transfer to a school for just one year? Nevertheless, there are 68 of them (27 in Normandy and 41 in RG.) In comparison there are 92+140=232 freshmen transfers requested or over three times as many as seniors.

Being a Ladue school parent, I was interested to see the numbers transferring into our district by grade level. I found it ironic we are opening a lovely new Fifth Grade Center this fall in the district -- and only one transfer from Normandy and none from Riverview Gardens want to attend it! We have 27 requests for K-4, 19 for 6-8 and only 12 for 9-12. So my son will not have to worry about transfer students increasing the classroom size at the high school much at all, especially with 7 of the 12 being freshmen. And I bet the district will spread out the 27 K-4 students over our four elementary students. I think the transfer parents were hoping for Old Bonhomme to be closer to I-170, but I believe the parents can only specify a district and not the school, so I am sure the 27 students would be spread out by the district to Reed, Conway and Spoede schools too. A sudden increase of 27 elementary students to any one of the schools could have posed a problem, but spreading them out so that each just has 7 or 8 more students should not be so bad (especially with the Fifth Grade Center opening this year.)

I also found it interesting that one student in Normandy requested Mehlville and one student in RG requested Francis Howell -- maybe all their friends go to the other neighboring school! Can those two students ride the buses from their neighboring districts since they are going there anyway?

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