Schools are doing the math

Some haven’t gotten back from vacation yet. A few might have forgotten Tuesday was the first day back. Others may have moved away last month and never notified the school. In any scenario, school principals are spending this first week of school tracking down students who signed up for class but haven’t shown up yet.

The numbers are hugely important to the school districts because they indicate how much money they’ll get this year from the state. District officials made predictions last year then based their budgets on those predictions.

For every student included in the average daily attendance, the district receives about $5,000 from the state. Fewer students mean less money and budget cuts, like the ones the Coeur d’Alene School District just had after it missed growth projections by about one and a half percent.

“That is the story of the year for us, is what happens with enrollment,” said district Superintendent Harry Amend.

Numbers won’t be solid until the end of the week, but so far, things don’t look terrible, district Business Manager Steve Briggs said.

Though preliminary enrollment numbers at area schools don’t show any signs of a significant drop in enrollment, district officials are bracing themselves. The district budgeted for about a 1 percent enrollment drop.

“It is too early tonight to be real definitive about our enrollment,” Amend said Tuesday at the district’s Board of Trustees meeting. “We’re being real sensitive about creating false expectations.”

Briggs will be working this week to see that the attendance numbers of each school are as accurate as they can be.

Trustees may meet Friday to discuss asking voters to approve an emergency levy. This week’s attendance numbers will determine whether the district qualifies for the levy. Districts are allowed to consider emergency levies if the initial average daily attendance is higher than it was the previous year.

School principals met with district officials Tuesday afternoon to go over the day’s attendance numbers. It’s their job this week to see who’s on the list but missing from class and find out if they’ll be attending the school this year.

Principals had their enrollment numbers ironed out by last week, giving them time to draft class lists and figure out how many kids need to be transferred to which school and in what grade levels, if any. The reshuffling happened at a number of schools in the district, where students didn’t enroll in amounts easy to divvy evenly into classes. That means some teachers and students found out just recently they’ll be at a new school this year.

Overall, 16 buses are being used to transport about 100 kids from their neighborhood schools. Called a “forced transfer,” the move means kids get picked up at their neighborhood schools, then bused to another school with room for them.

“Thank goodness children are so resilient and flexible,” said Kathy Kuntz, principal of Atlas Elementary in Hayden.

At Atlas, 30 students were transferred to nearby Ramsey, Hayden Meadows and Dalton Gardens, Kuntz said. And, showing how unpredictable the number of students and where they live can be, a group of second-graders was transferred out of Hayden Meadows and into Atlas to form a full class.

Budget constraints in the district make the transfers necessary because there isn’t enough money to pay teachers to teach classes that aren’t full, Assistant Superintendent Hazel Bauman said at Tuesday’s board meeting.

“The parents, rightly so, have anxiety about this,” she said. “(But) within a few days of that student enrolling in the new school, the fears subside.”

Hayden Meadows Elementary Principal Patty Woodworth said she tries her best to keep families at the same school when figuring out transfers, so sometimes she’ll keep a couple classes with one or two extra students if it means keeping siblings at the same school.

She has offered to let transferred students come back as spots become available but said she expects most will choose to stay at their new schools.

“The kids adjust pretty quickly,” she said. “It’s much harder for the parents.”

Neither the Lakeland nor Post Falls school district expects to do any forced transfers this year, district officials said. But emergency levies are likely.

Official predictions pegged enrollment in the Post Falls School District increasing by about 2 percent, and Superintendent Jerry Keane said initial attendance numbers look like that will stand up.

“Again, it’s a little imprecise because there are students coming and going, and it’s hard to lasso them,” he said.

The district’s Board of Trustees will meet Saturday morning to discuss asking voters for a one-year emergency levy to pay the extra costs that come with more students, such as more employees, equipment and textbooks. Tentative estimates have the levy rate at 15 cents per $1,000 of valued property, Keane said.

Lakeland’s Board of Trustees also will meet Friday to discuss a possible emergency levy. The district predicted that its overall enrollment of about 4,400 would increase by 100. Tuesday’s numbers showed an increase of just 26. That could mean budget cuts, but Assistant Superintendent Ron Schmidt said they’ll have to wait until the end of the week to see.