October headcount by grade

Source. Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, Frequently Requested Data → Enrollment Data, October headcount. The FY2024 edition is oct_hdcnt_fy24.xls, about 2.1 MB. Type. Primary source — per-district enrollment by individual grade.

What it contains. A single-day headcount for every district, broken out by individual grade — kindergarten through twelve, separately — rather than by the grade bands the funding formula uses. Also disaggregated by race and gender on companion sheets.

Why it matters here. The Fair School Funding Plan’s base cost prices teachers at four different pupil-teacher ratios: kindergarten, grades 1–3, grades 4–8, and grades 9–12, plus a separate career-technical ratio. The department publishes the banded ADM in its funding calculator, but only this file publishes the grades that make up each band. It is what allows an independent check that the bands account for the reported headcount rather than assuming it.

A five-column extract is committed at crates/foundation/fixtures/fy24-district-grade-bands.csv.

Access constraints. Free. Still published in the pre-2007 OLE2 .xls format, which is a compound document, not a zip, and shares nothing with XLSX beyond the extension’s family resemblance. crates/spreadsheet reads it natively — an OLE2 sector walker and a BIFF8 record parser — so extraction from this source is reproducible from a checkout with no external converter. It was not, until the reader was written: the fixture was produced through headless LibreOffice, and that pipeline summed a withheld <10 as zero.

Caveats:

• Headcount is not ADM. This is a single-day count; average daily membership is time-weighted across the year and is the quantity the formula actually funds. The two differ by a percent or two per district and by more where enrollment moved mid-year.

• Small counts are suppressed as <10, not withheld as blank. Treating that as zero understates any aggregate over small districts — which are exactly the districts a school-funding question is usually about. See crates/connect/src/conventions.rs.

  Five districts in this file have a suppressed grade, and they are the five smallest in Ohio: Kelleys Island, Put-in-Bay, College Corner, Vanlue, Bloomfield-Mespo. The first three are outside the committed extract already. For the other two the grade band containing the withheld grade is left blank, because a band summed over a <10 is not a smaller band — it is a band whose total is unknown. The LibreOffice-derived fixture summed them as zero and recorded Vanlue’s grades 9-12 as 56 where the true figure is between 57 and 65. verified

• District data is on the third of seven sheets, which is why conversion targets .xlsx rather than CSV: LibreOffice’s CSV filter exports only the active sheet.

Feeds connector #

dew-foundation.