Hispanic School Enrollment Jumps 64.5 Percent

The Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission serves as an affiliate of the Arkansas Census State Data Center. The center, created in 1979, is the official representative of the U.S. Bureau of the Census in Arkansas. As an affiliate of the ACSDC, it is the commission’s responsibility to help disseminate U.S. Census information to data users throughout the region. Normally this means that our planning office responds to a variety of data user questions on a daily basis. Very often this entails helping individuals navigate into a rather large and sometimes tricky Web site found at www.census.gov.

If you go to the Web site on a regular basis you may notice that the Census Bureau releases information in its “Newsroom” section. Usually you can find interesting tidbits such as 54.6 million: The projected number of students to be enrolled in the nation’s elementary and high schools (grades K-12) this fall. That number exceeds the 1970 total of 51.3 million, when virtually all of these students were “baby boomers,” who swelled school enrollments.

However, if you want to find information relevant to our region or the counties within our region you have to dig a bit deeper. For example, on Aug. 11 the Census Bureau released data giving its latest estimates of population represented in categories of race and Hispanic origin. If you want information about counties in our area, just click on the “detailed tables” link. From here you can download the “entire data set” and find access to a large number of population datasets. If you scroll down you will find county datasets. With a little effort you can find tables that offer Arkansas (and Missouri) county data. Due to the shear volume of the data, it is organized into tables that are difficult to grasp at first glance.

For this reason, we like to regroup the data and show it in graphic forms (see charts).

The graphs show that the population in both Benton and Washington counties as estimated by the U.S. Census continues to grow at a steady pace. The Benton County population estimate has grown by 16.1 percent since 2000, and the Hispanic origin population estimate has grown by about 56 percent. In Washington County, the estimated population has grown by 9.7 percent, and the Hispanic origin population has grown by 51.5 percent. Retailers and others who market to the Hispanic demographic can look forward to this trend continuing.

The graphs representing Benton and Washington County minority racial populations also show additional growth. However, the base levels of these population groups were small and the overall demographic change is not very significant relative to total population.

Sometimes it is a useful exercise to compare other sources of data to verify estimates. In this case we can look at school enrollment figures to see how these compare to the U.S. Census estimates.

Our school enrollment graphs show that the trends in both total population and Hispanic origin population are similar. However, we see that the percentage of total population growth (9.7 percent) is significantly lower than school enrollment figures (12.8 percent) and the Hispanic enrollment increase (64.5 percent) is quite a bit more than the estimated Hispanic population percentage change (51.5 percent). This may indicate that more families of Hispanic origin with school age children are moving into Washington County school districts than are enrolling in Benton County.

The practice of charting population trends raises the question, “Will these trends continue?”

All trends are subject to forces of change. For population growth in Northwest Arkansas, we must continue to monitor factors such as the unemployment rate and housing costs. If these figures stay low compared to other parts of the country, we can continue to expect migration into Northwest Arkansas in the near term future.

(Paul Justus is a regional planner with the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commision.)