After just about a year of studying the elementary levels of the Hooksett School District, the School Board’s Long Range Planning Committee came back with the conclusion that the town would need another school in the next 15 to 20 years, according to enrollment projections.

They also concluded the district would need to do something to alleviate a projected first-grade enrollment bubble in the next few years.

At a School Board meeting on Tuesday, Aug. 19, the committee presented its 70-plus page report and findings.

The committee came up with a computerized data model using factors including yearly certificates of occupancy that come through the town planning department, birth rates, average number and age of children per household, and move-in to moveout ratios of homes in Hooksett to closely project the amount of growth or decline in enrollment over the next 20 years.

They used the same numbers for each kind of housing unit that planning consultant Bruce Mayberry used when he extensively studied the town’s growth last year.

“Going into something like this, I think a lot of people on the committee had some perceptions of what we needed in town,” said the committee’s chairman, Matt Comai. “Once we really looked at the data, we found ways which that data was speaking to us differently.”

The committee recommended reassigning students in the district to prepare for a projected 2010-11 enrollment increase that could max out Underhill’s capacity. The school is already approaching the standard 90 percent capacity rate.

The bubble would be passing, Comai said, and would not justify the need for a new building at this point. The committee also advised the School Board to continue working with Manchester Sand and Gravel to obtain a suitable future school site.

The committee emphasized enrollment’s direct correlation to housing construction, and encouraged the board to keep a close eye on those factors to update the multipliers periodically and re-project enrollment.

They also compared the current grade-span configuration model for the district to a neighborhood schools model, which if implemented would require some redistricting. They presented several options for both types of models for the future, including keeping it as and building a preschool and kindergarten facility that would change the grade spans for Memorial, Underhill and Cawley.

The district’s newly formed High School Study Committee will use the same sort of data to explore and make recommendations on the district’s future high school facility needs.