Spokane schools reverse decline

The birds and the bees have something to do with it.

So does all-day kindergarten.

And maybe the lousy economy.

Beyond that, Spokane school officials can only speculate about why enrollment has edged up after nine straight years of declines.

“It’s really hard to tease out any real answers,” said Nancy Stowell, superintendent.

The Oct. 1 count shows that enrollment increased enough in elementary schools to make up for a slight decline at the middle schools. Total high school enrollment was unchanged, with a drop at Lewis and Clark but increases at the others.

The bottom line: 29,673 students in all grades – an increase of 126 from last year – attend Spokane Public Schools.

That’s still nearly 9 percent fewer students than were enrolled in October 1998. But because state funding is based largely on enrollment, any increase is good news for a district that has seen many students depart for the suburbs.

There’s no telling whether the one-year increase means the district has bottomed out, said Craig Numata, district supervisor for financial services.

State statistics show that Spokane has seen a slight increase in births in recent years, Numata said. But he thought it’d be another two years before those youngsters started showing up in schools – assuming their parents don’t move into the Mead, Central Valley or other surrounding school districts that have enjoyed steady growth.

“We’d kind of been looking at 2010-11 as when we’d be hitting bottom,” with increases starting in the 2011-12 school year, Numata said.

The biggest growth occurred in the northeast corner of the city, with Whitman Elementary adding a fifth-grade teacher and two kindergarten teachers to accommodate roughly 50 more students than last year.

The increase makes it more difficult to get every kid into library, music and other special programs every week, said Matthew Henshaw, Whitman’s assistant principal. The school has added more playground supervisors, and storage space is in short supply because every classroom is full. Rather than have some students bused to other schools, some teachers agreed to take one or two students more than the limit outlined in their contracts, he said.

Those challenges are better than the alternative, Henshaw said. “When you’ve got declining enrollment at a school, you eventually have to close a classroom, and that means losing a teacher.”

Part of the growth appears directly related to the expansion of all-day kindergarten, a state-funded program in five Spokane schools last year and 12 this year. Districtwide, there are 45 more kindergartners.

But enrollment is also up in the other elementary grades. Some of those students might be the siblings of kindergartners, said district spokeswoman Terren Roloff. Or maybe they’re kids whose parents decided not to move to outlying areas when gas hit record highs or when the economy tanked, Stowell said.

Whatever the cause, it hasn’t hurt the county’s second- and third-largest districts.

The Central Valley School District has seen a 12 percent enrollment increase so far this decade – an average of 171 students a year. While the district last year saw an increase of just one student, it’s serving 98 more students this year.

Mead School District has grown even faster, with 14.5 percent more students this year than at the beginning of the decade. The district has 140 more students now than at the start of October last year.

Mead has more students than ever in kindergarten and second, fifth and seventh grades. Conversely, the combined senior class at the district’s two high schools is the smallest the district has seen since 2005, and the junior class is the smallest since 2004.