Paper presented in Session 68: Small Area Population Estimates, Annual Meetings of the Population Association of America, New Orleans, Louisiana, April 11, 2013.

This paper is released to inform interested parties of ongoing research and to encourage discussion. Any views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the U.S. Census Bureau.

The American Community Survey (ACS) has been envisioned by the Census Bureau as the replacement of the once-a-decade long form data collection previously undertaken as part of the decennial Census. In addition to providing more frequent and timely data, the survey is designed to provide reliable data at small geographic levels for meeting policy and programmatic needs. This analysis examines data from the Palm Beach Florida (PBF) school district regarding schoolchildren who speak a language other than English. We compare estimates from the administrative school-based data with those from the sample survey estimates of the ACS. We find that while the ACS one-year data file provides reasonable quality estimates for the major language groups, the five-year ACS data provides better information for a larger number of specific languages, as well as estimates that are closer to the administrative levels reported.