Public school enrollment numbers will continue to dip statewide and in Alachua County during the 2009-10 school year, according to the latest state numbers.

Projections released earlier in June showed Alachua County's enrollment - including charter schools - dropping for the third straight school year.The projected enrollment is 26,900 students - down about 1.5 percent from 27,293 students during the 2008-09 school year. Since the 2006-07 school year, Alachua County's enrollment is down 1,344 students, or almost 5 percent.

Enrollment in public schools is on the decline statewide, and the trend is even more pronounced in Alachua County.

From 2007-08 to this school year, statewide student enrollment numbers dropped by nearly 25,000 to 2,620,801, Florida Department of Education numbers show.

That's the lowest number since 2004.

Stan Smith, director of the University of Florida Bureau of Economic and Business Research, said factors in the statewide enrollment reduction include a decline in the state's birthrate throughout the first half of the 1990s.

Counts of the U.S. Hispanic population are available every ten years from the decennial census, but for the years following or between censuses, estimates have to be created using data and techniques that are expected to track changes in that population over time. Such estimates are a recent development and there is currently no standard methodology that has been widely used, carefully documented, and rigorously tested. In this article, we describe an experimental methodology for estimating the Hispanic population of states and counties.

Estimates of the Hispanic population have traditionally been based on historical trends, ratios, or some variant of the cohort-component method. In this article, we describe and test a methodology in which estimates of the Hispanic population are based on symptomatic indicators of population change such as births, deaths, and school enrollments. Methods. Using a variety of techniques, we develop Hispanic population estimates for counties in Florida. We evaluate the accuracy of those estimates by comparing them with 2000 census counts.