Enrollment declines for School District 81

Enrollment for Spokane School District 81 and several other area districts dropped this month, but Mead and Central Valley school districts are seeing dozens of new students.

For the first time in a decade, District 81's population of full- time-equivalent students has dipped below 30,000.

Enrollment numbers for the first week of school show the district has 145 fewer students compared with last September. The numbers, however, will change slightly next month as enrollment stabilizes, officials said.

"The decline is there, the decline is real," Ned Hammond, director of capital projects and planning, told the school board last week.

A decline in the birth rate coupled with a flat economy will mean fewer students in elementary schools statewide, statistics show.

But Mead School District seems to be bucking that trend. Of the 219 new students, about 102 are in the elementary schools.

"This growth is larger than we expected," said Al Swanson, Mead's assistant superintendent of finance.

Part of the increase may be due to housing growth in the area, he said. "I'm convinced that every year, a particular class grows because families choose to live in the Mead district," Swanson said.

Central Valley School District, the second-largest district in Spokane County, has 61 more students compared with last September's 10,510. Growth there, however, was in the middle schools and high schools, said Jan Hutton, CV's director of business services.

The increase may be due to the population increase in Liberty Lake and elsewhere in the Valley, officials said. The school district also is building two new high schools, in time for school in the fall of 2002.

Although District 81's enrollment is decreasing, the decline this fall wasn't as drastic as officials had expected. Before students started school Aug. 30, officials predicted losing as many as 400 students.

District 81 has 392 fewer elementary school students, but its enrollment in the middle schools and high schools are up by 95 and 152, respectively.

Lewis and Clark High School, with its renovation, has attracted new students, Hammond said. Rogers High School, thanks to its ROTC and other programs,is seeing fewer dropouts in the last few years, he said.

The district also is experiencing an increase in students attending Wilson Elementary, Roosevelt Elementary and Sacajawea Middle School, Hammond told the board.

Mead has made a special effort to attract home-schooled students, at least part time. That's brought the equivalent of 47 full-time students to the district, Swanson said.

To accommodate all the newcomers, the Mead School District hired three teachers at the elementary level. Before school started this month, staff members tried to get an idea of how many kids would come to class by calling every family with children in the elementary schools, Swanson said.

It's a more complicated process for District 81, which has about 29,740 full-time students this fall.

Students in six District 81 classrooms walked into class last week and found out they had new teachers. Because there were fewer students in the elementary schools, several substitute teachers who started out the school year had to give up their classes. Those classes were taken over by contracted teachers from other schools with reduced enrollment.

It happens every year since it's hard to predict how many students will come in the fall, said Staci Vesneske, District 81's director of certificated employment services.

"Students don't come in neat packages of 24," she said.

"Whenever we talk about moving a teacher, student reaction is something we always consider," Vesneske added. "But we're entrusted by the public to be fiscally responsible. We need to make sure we're not over-staffed."

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