SPRINGDALE : Enrollment rate rises
Posted on Monday, August 25, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/235364/
SPRINGDALE — An unexpected increase in first-day attendance has left Springdale School District administrators searching for certainty about growth and space for additional students.
When school started Monday, more than 1, 000 additional students filed into classrooms than at the start of last year, said Hartzell Jones, deputy superintendent for personnel. The next day, 200 additional students enrolled.
“We were surprised,” Jones said. “We didn’t see any signs that we were going to grow this amount.”
School Board members and administrators made decisions throughout the last year guided by growth projections of 200 additional students.
After years of adding about 800 students to its annual enrollment, the district added just 300 students at the start of the 2007-08 school year, altering the way leaders approached district finances, which are structured around state-provided per-pupil funding.
Springdale expected the growth slowdown to continue this year, in keeping with conservative enrollment projections of other large districts, Jones said.
While other Northwest Arkansas schools saw typical increases in attendance, Springdale’s first-day figures defied all projections.
First-day counts are not always the most reliable figures, assistant superintendent for business affairs Allen Williams said.
Student registrations continue through the first week of classes, and principals track enrolled students who’ve left the district.
The Arkansas Department of Education collects official enrollment figures Oct. 1 and uses the data to distribute $ 5, 619-perstudent funding.
Even if Springdale’s numbers fluctuate by several hundred students, the district still will have larger growth than it anticipated, Williams said.
“We were hoping for 200 or 300,” he said. “We knew we were registering a lot of students the last two weeks. What you don’t know is how many you register will actually show up.”
State law mandates class sizes of 20 to 30 students depending on grade level.
The district has classroom space to accommodate the growth, Jones said.
Two new elementary schools — Monitor and Shaw — opened last year well below their 850-pupil capacity. Shaw had 425 pupils, leaving an entire wing of classrooms vacant.
Once numbers are final, administrators will consider shifting children out of their attendance boundaries to attend schools with open classrooms, Jones said. Springdale also may hire additional teachers.
No other Northwest Arkansas district experienced such an upredicted growth in first-day attendance.
Rogers schools added 263 students to its first-day count, a 2 percent increase from 13, 355 last year, spokesman Ashley Kelley said. The number is in keeping with the district’s growth for the last five years, which has stayed between 1. 4 percent and 3. 6 percent.
Fayetteville schools added 60 students to its first-day count, a 0. 7 percent increase. Last year, the district’s enrollment went down slightly.
Bentonville, long the state’s fastest-growing district, added ™ students to its first-day count, student services director Brad Reed said. By the third day, the increase raised to 473, about 3. 9 percent higher than last year’s count. Bentonville enrollment typically grows between 7 percent and 10 percent.
“We never really know what to expect,” Reed said.
The district has about 12, 700 students formally enrolled, but if they all showed up on the first day of classes, every building would have been filled beyond capacity, he said.
Growth in Northwest Arkansas schools — long a certainty — has become more difficult to predict.
Economic uncertainty and high energy prices have lowered job creation rates and fueled trouble in the housing market.
The most recent edition of the Skyline Report, a quarterly real estate survey, shows a 35 percent drop in complete but unoccupied homes in Benton and Washington county subdivisions. The area still has 1, 566 unoccupied new houses, remnants of a once-thriving housing market.
The report, released Wednesday, was completed by the Center for Business and Economic research at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
School administrators track enrollment growth and loss throughout the previous school year, consult real estate agents and major employers, and examine vacant commercial and residential space before predicting enrollment.
“Even with all of the best information you have, really it’s a guessing game,” Reed said. “One thing you can be certain of is that you are going to be wrong.” Growth predictions are more than guesses, Williams said. They’re tools districts use to plan budgets, bus routes and facilities plans. After last year’s drop in new students, Springdale administrators assumed the times of rapid growth were over. The School Board voted in April to prohibit transfers out of district to maintain enrollment and funding levels. It also voted to maintain $ 3. 2 million in budget cuts from the previous year into the 2008-09 school year, assuming the possibility of zero student growth. In June, the board approved a revision to the district’s 10-year growth plan, canceling plans for two new schools and promising to re-evaluate plans for three others by an October deadline. The policies may have to be revised if this year’s growth is a sign that enrollment trends will bounce back, Williams said. The new students mean more per-pupil funding, but they also create uncertainty about whether the trend will continue. “Are we back to the norm ? We don’t know,” Williams said. “Right now, things are just very unpredictable.”
To contact this reporter: eblad@arkansasonline. com