Your 2030 kindergarten class has already been born.
The children who will start kindergarten in fall 2030 were born in 2024 and 2025 — and their number is already in the public record, county by county. So is a second number most enrollment conversations never touch: how many families are arriving in or leaving your market each year, and what they earn.
Sometimes both point the same way. Sometimes they split. Reading them as a pair is what tells you what your market is doing — and which pair you get varies enormously from one county to the next.
Every figure is a direct count from official public records. You don't need to be a data expert to bring this picture to your leadership team.
A reading here describes the water your school swims in. What you do about it is strategy.
Federal birth records and federal county-to-county migration data · Analysis: Linda Haitani LLC
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Signal 1 — The kindergarten pipeline
Signal 2 — Family migration
Signal 3 — The income lens
How far this data goes
Public data describes the water level. Any one boat sits differently in it. Births set the size of the pool without predicting enrollment: migration, private-school share, and family choices all intervene between a birth certificate and a kindergarten seat. Full-pay families concentrate unevenly, and a school's own micro-market can run against its county's average. What this data offers is a shared, verifiable starting point — the strategic questions become knowable years before they arrive in an admission funnel.
Four questions for your leadership team
Most schools draw across county lines
Add up to three neighboring counties to see the same headline signals side by side.
Where this goes next
I'm publishing more of these — other signals hiding in the same public record, and what school leaders are finding when they look up their own counties. If you'd like them as they come, leave your email.