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About Our District Confirming enrollment helps fix class sizes  September 9, 2008 Whenever parents and teachers tell me that each school year feels a little different than the last, I have to agree. But it does seem that there are two things you can always expect to see in Mounds View Public Schools every fall: Declining enrollment and a few opening days of larger than expected class sizes. This fall is no different, so I’d like to explain why. Declining enrollment For the 11th year in a row, K-12 enrollment has declined. This fall’s 2008-09 enrollment is 9,640 – down 53 students from last fall. But a closer look reveals some important facts: * Enrollment decline is not the result of resident students choosing other school options. Mounds View consistently enrolls 80 percent of all possible resident students each year. * Fewer families with school-aged children are moving into the District, as aging residents remain in place. More than projected Despite our continued decline, enrollment is about 125 students higher than we projected when the School Board approved its budget in June. This has created some higher-than-expected class sizes in a handful of elementary schools across the District. Unfortunately because of the way schools are funded, there’s little we can do to prevent this each year. Schools are funded on a per-pupil basis, so we staff our schools with teachers in January based on the number of students we expect in September. Fiscal responsibility says you can’t spend money that you don’t have, and you don’t have the money necessary to hire additional teachers until you have confirmed the number of students in schools every fall. Class size relief So here’s the good news. Now that we have confirmed our 2008-09 enrollment, Mounds View will receive more state funding than we had expected, allowing us to hire additional teachers to address high class sizes at several elementary schools. Specifically, the School Board’s decision to give me the authority to staff an additional 7.5 full-time teaching positions will allow us to bring all of our elementary school classes within the School Board’s approved class size ranges. Core classes in our middle schools and high schools remain within the Board’s approved class size ranges as well. To view class sizes and enrollments by grade and by school, please visit here. Non-residents Some have wondered if our practice of enrolling non-resident students has created higher class sizes. It’s true that in some years, non-resident enrollment has allowed us to offer additional kindergarten sections, but I can assure you that non-resident enrollment is not the cause of our temporarily higher class sizes this fall. Non-resident students must apply for enrollment and are accepted only if their enrollment does not negatively impact the class size in their particular grade or school. We have been working with professional demographers over the past six years to refine our enrollment projections, and we will continue this work to address the impact of our continuing pattern of declining enrollment. Even though this staffing process isn’t new, it isn’t easy for students, parents and teachers to experience. So I sincerely want to thank our community for its patience and flexibility during these opening days of schools. I’m certain the inconvenience of shifting some students is worth the advantages of experiencing the lowest class sizes we can offer. |
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