Late last year I wrote a series of blogs about what I’d learned from Fall conference season. One of my themes was that FCAs had jumped the shark — given how often they showed up across the conferences I attended, surely the topic had peaked. 

Last week I was at the Council of Great City Schools (CGCS) annual COO Conference in Detroit, and I want to revisit that take. Not because I was entirely wrong, but because I was looking at the wrong slice of the audience. 

CGCS brings senior leaders together from 81 of the largest urban school districts in the US. I was pleasantly surprised at how much air time FCAs got — from presenters and from the people I had the pleasure of speaking with throughout the conference. And the more I listened, the clearer it became that for this audience, FCAs aren’t a passing trend. They’re table stakes. 

The Pressures Driving the Conversation

Nearly every school district in the US (and Canada, for that matter) is facing the need to right-size its portfolio. Even districts that are growing often have pockets in older neighborhoods with excess capacity. In the US, school choice and the rise of charter schools add further headwinds — and in a more volatile enrollment environment, the defensibility bar for any closure or consolidation decision gets meaningfully higher. 

Layer on top of that the bond referendum cycle. Many districts in attendance have the opportunity to put referendums to their voters to fund new capital construction and chip away at Deferred Capital Renewal and Maintenance (DCRM) backlogs. I was at the conference presenting alongside Dave Dolan from the School District of Palm Beach County (SDPBC) on our on-going project, which got its start supporting their successful 2024 bond referendum. Strong FCA data was central to making that case to voters — and it’s central to every district trying to do the same. 

FCAs as Foundation, not the Whole Story

Over and over I heard the same thing: districts navigating school closures and consolidations need a foundation of consistent and defensible FCA data, paired with utilization data, evidence of how effectively the space supports learning outcomes, and credible forecasts of future demographics. 

If that sounds familiar to regular readers, it should. It’s essentially the Data Hierarchy Pyramid in action — FCA data at the foundation, with Programmatic and Functional data layered on top, plus external demand context that no single dataset will give you. FCAs aren’t the whole answer. They’re what makes the rest of the answer credible. 

The Part Nobody Talks About

Here’s the thing about closure meetings: they are some of the most emotionally charged professional presentations I have ever done. Community members associate enormous emotional weight with their local school, and the data — no matter how good — is not what you lead with. 

So what do you lead with? Acknowledgment of what the school means to the community. The process that brought you to this point. Evidence that you’ve actually heard the people in the room. Only then do you get to condition, utilization, demographics, and the rest of it. 

But here’s why the data still matters enormously: when you do get there, you need to be confident that nobody can shoot holes in your business case. The data isn’t your opening argument. It’s the floor underneath everything else, and if it’s soft, the whole presentation collapses. The pressure on FCA quality in these moments is ratcheted up to 11. 

So, Was I Wrong?

Sort of. My original observation about over-saturation was probably fair for the higher-ed-heavy conferences I’d attended last fall. But “the topic is everywhere at conferences” and “the topic is overhyped” are two different claims, and I conflated them. 

For the largest school districts in the US — facing right-sizing pressure, bond cycles, school choice headwinds, and packed gymnasiums full of worried parents — FCAs are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do. They’re earning their air time.  If your district had to defend a closure decision in a public meeting tomorrow, would your FCA data hold up? 

Looks like Fonzie can keep the water skis in the garage a while longer!