The Franciscan School is a parish school attached to St. Francis Parish in the Diocese of Raleigh. For 2019-20, it has 645 students enrolled in grades Kindergarten through eighth grade. Virtually every grade has three sections. As recently as 2015-16, however, the school had 706 students. This led to questions about what the appropriate and achievable enrollment should be and how the school should achieve that number.
Through extensive market research, including surveys, focus groups and individual interviews, Meitler created a statistical profile of the school, its demographics and future enrollment potential. Meitler was also able to determine what motivated parents to both consider The Franciscan School and to finally decide to enroll their child in the school.
An unexpectedly major accomplishment of this project was to determine the optimum capacity of the school given current staffing. Upon delivery of the final report, the Finance Council expressed gratitude to Meitler for the objective analysis of the school and its preferred future.
