Glen Ellyn School District 41 officials and pro-referendum campaigners might be satisfied with the results of a recent study that validates a growing enrollment in the district but some school board candidates still have questions.

The elementary school district recently released results from a demographic study by John D. Kasarda of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which show the district growing by almost 200 students over the next three years.

District officials and School Board members have said the steady climb in enrollment justifies a new school building on the Hadley Junior High School campus to alleviate overcrowding problems the district already faces at its elementary schools.

The district will ask voters Tuesday if they may borrow $40 million to pay for the new building and other construction work to help give students and teachers breathing room at its four other schools.

But Steven Vondrak and Bob Solak, two candidates running for the School Board, who also plan to vote against the ballot question, are asking how Kasarda got his numbers.

Besides collecting census data from Glen Ellyn, the demographer also included the same information from the district’s other recruiting areas including Glendale Heights, Carol Stream, Lombard and Wheaton.

But the district’s boundaries only take a sliver of students from those surrounding communities, Vondrak said.

“I definitely have questions with all the demographers,” Vondrak said. “I don’t know if it’s really representative of the whole town there.”

Plus all of the feeder districts for Glenbard Township High School District 87 including District 89 and 200 are seeing peaks or declines in their enrollments, he said.

District 41’s population could peak next school year, Kasarda said, if housing turnover and new residential development rates decline through 2016 — a significant change from previous studies by Northern Illinois University demographers that expected enrollment to grow.

“The thing that I thought was most interesting is we’re going to peak next year,” Solak said.

“And that’s something the NIU projections have never shown,” he said. “That as a board member would make me wary of voting for a $40 million referendum.”