An expected influx of high school students during the next few years in Carroll County public schools has prompted school officials to consider shrinking the attendance area of North Carroll High School and contemplate scrapping plans to reduce capacity at mammoth Westminster High School.

Enrollment projections released this month show that county schools are expected to gain nearly 800 high-schoolers in the next four years while elementary and middle school populations level off or decline slightly.

The crowded student population at Hampstead's North Carroll High will continue to swell through at least the 2009-2010 school year.

The 26-year-old school, built for 1,360 students, has 1,558. The school is projected to gain 100 students in the next three years.

"They are using every nook and cranny and then some," Susan Holt, vice president of the Carroll County school board, said. "Even some of those closets are doubled up."

Superintendent Charles I. Ecker said the school district might need to redraw the boundaries for the school's attendance area for the 2004-2005 school year, shifting students who would have attended North Carroll High southward into the Westminster attendance areas.

That reallocation would pinch two Westminster-area high schools and could derail school officials' attempts to decrease capacity at Westminster High, which is much larger than the 1,200-student high schools the county has built in recent years.

Even after the opening of nearby Winters Mill High School in August, Westminster High has 2,132 students. This year, it is 219 students over capacity. With projections showing the school's enrollment hovering in the 1,700s for the next five years, plans to decrease the school's capacity to 1,600 and convert vacated space into new career and technology classrooms might have to be scuttled, school officials say.

But one point could prevent the school system from scrapping those plans.

The state Board of Public Works reimbursed Carroll County $3.5 million last year for Winters Mill High on the condition that the school district shrink the student population of Westminster High to make room for more vocational programs.

Ecker must justify to state school planners his proposal to maintain Westminster High's current capacity and to retain the school's classroom space for its instructional needs.

"If we reduce the capacity [there], then we will need an addition at North Carroll or Winters Mill or Westminster to handle the population," he said.

The schools chief and his facilities director, Raymond Prokop, are scheduled to meet with Maryland's Interagency Committee for State Public School Construction staff Dec. 12.

In calculating this year's school enrollment projections - 10-year estimates of how many students will show up at each grade level at each of Carroll's 37 elementary, middle and high schools - school transportation assistant David Reeve used a new county database of planned residential developments.

After using the traditional formula for projecting how many students will advance from grade level to grade level at each school, Reeve checked his projections against county records that track building permit applications, building permits and use-and-occupancy permits.

"The scientific part of enrollment projections remains the same, but the art of fine-tuning them has a new element to it," he said.

"The new information does not tell us if the people moving into that home will have any school-aged children or if they'll go to public school or what ages and grade levels those children may be, but it does help us check."

He used enrollment projections for North Carroll High as an example.

The traditional method for projections show that enrollment at the school will grow by 16 to 52 students for each of the next five years before leveling off and then gradually declining with the 2009-2010 school year.

But, Reeve said, the 370 residential building permits issued last year in the North Carroll High attendance area indicate that the number of students attending area schools might not decline soon - and might increase through the end of the decade.