Student count up

by Kurt Nesbitt
Contributing Writer
Enrollment numbers for Elk River Area Public Schools keep going up. And on Monday night, School Board members learned the first week of school this year proved no exception.

According to figures from Joe Stangler, the district’s director of research and assessment, enrollment for last Friday was 303 students larger than last year, which is a growth of 2.3 percent.

“This is the largest growth we’ve seen in over 10 years. We’ve had fifteen hundred flat but this is the first year we’ve seen growth come back like we experienced in the early 2000s, when we were growing rather rapidly,” he said.

“The one thing we’ve seen with the growth, there’s areas across the district that are growing, and it’s not just one particular area. I think, when you look at the growth in the south, the center and the north, each area is growing. I know in the center of the district, our elementary population is less than last year. A big factor there — the big fifth grade class year in the center of the district was the biggest fifth grade class they’d ever had so when you replace it with a smaller kindergarten, you are going to have a little bit smaller enrollment. However, that’s been made up toward the middle and the high schools toward the center of the district.”

Stangler said the southern part of the district has growth of over 200 students when compared with last September and the northern part, near Zimmerman, has growth of 90 students over last year. He noted cohort growth – kindergarten classes that become first-grade classes and then second-grade classes – is a part of the increase.

“This is the first year where we’ve have positive growth at every grade level, indicating that we are retaining our students at a higher rate and also adding more students to our system, whether it’s through move-ins or re-attracting students into our fine school system. So really, across the board we’re seeing growth at every grade level and in every community throughout the district,” he said.

Stangler said in response to a question from Director Gregg Peppin that in the past few years elementary has actually been smaller each year because kindergarten classes coming in were smallest; the smallest grade level is second grade. That group of students is growing, since it has 919 students this year.

But other school districts’ smallest grades are also their second-grades. That trend coincides with a state demographer’s report that said the birth rate for that group was low because it was the height of the recession, Stangler said.

“Outside of that, we are attracting students to our system and I think probably the biggest notable is at Prairie View (Elementary and Middle School), where every grade level attracted students back into our district from other school districts this year. We’re very excited about that and the growth that it’s providing for us,” he said.

Later in the meeting, the School Board voted a third time to add more positions at schools around the district. Otsego Elementary got another half-time position in the fifth-grade. Prairie View Elementary got another half-time position in the fifth-grade, Westwood Elementary got a full-time position in the fifth-grade. The vote also added a specialist for music, physical education, art and media technology at the elementary level for the three schools.

The School Board decided to add more full-time equivalencies twice this past summer to accommodate the upward enrollment trend.