This year, 2,128 students are walking the halls of Border Land School Division (BLSD). The number is almost exactly what the division anticipated.
“We are only two students off of where we predicted we would be, which is great because staff is based on our predictions,” says Superintendent Krista Curry.
Curry says that because kindergarten students are only at school for half days, they count for half-time in enrollment terms. Accordingly, the number of full-time equivalents is 2,054.
A general falling trend
BLSD’s enrollment is down from 2,073 last year. Curry says the drop isn’t “abnormal” because the school division has seen a decline in recent years.
“There's no one place where we see a significant drop,” she says. “We have a [group] going through in the town of Altona, so Parkside is up 30 kids from last year, but that means that the schools that they were coming from are down.”
Curry says that beyond the large class moving through the division, the rest of the changes are quite small.
“When I look across our division, it's two or three kids up or down at each school,” she says.
Building a projection
The school division draws from various sources both inside and outside of it to generate its enrollment prediction. For kindergarten students, sometimes numbers are compiled from the health authority. While this offers a glimpse into how many students may enter the system, Curry says this strategy is limited because these numbers are based on postal codes. Not every postal code in the area sends their children to BLSD.
When it comes to the higher grades, the numbers tend to be stable.
“In our K-12 schools across the rest of the division, we don't have a lot of movement because they're in that school the whole time,” she says. “Those predictors are . . . easier to gauge because there's not a lot of change.”
Curry says that while numbers can fluctuate in the first few weeks of school because families tend to move during the summer months, once it comes to the end of the month, the number is steady.
Determining a budget
The enrollment number is important to the school division — it decides where funding is allocated.
“Our September 30th number is the number that they use to determine the dollars we're going to get in the budget that they announce at the end of January . . . next year,” says Curry. “We're always a year behind, . . . so our number for this year actually determines our budget for next year. We want our number to be as accurate as it can be so that when they are doing the funding announcement in January, we're getting the funds that we need to support the number of students that we have.”
Curry adds that if there is a significant increase between now and the end of June, it’s not accounted for in the funding formula.
~With files from Candace Derksen~