Enrollment drop is light
By Bobbi Mlynar
Originally published 01:53 p.m., August 12, 2008
Updated 01:53 p.m., August 12, 2008
In a worst-case scenario, the Emporia school district could have lost 800 to 900 pupils between the end of May and Monday, when classes began for the 2008-09 school year. Instead, at the end of the day, the head count was down only 169 students.
District officials had not known what to expect of student head count after Tyson Fresh Meats closed its slaughter operation here and shut down one of its processing shifts on Jan. 25.
Superintendent John Heim said the district knew that approximately 1,200 students in the Emporia district had one or both parents working at Tyson, and an additional 300 students whose parents’ jobs were not known.
The 1,200 students that could have been lost comprised about 25 percent of the district’s total students.
Factoring in the percentage of Tyson jobs lost against the percentage of Tyson-affiliated students produced an estimate of 800 to 900 students who could have been lost to the district.
“So when you look at 150, 160 on the first day of school, that doesn’t sound too bad,” Heim said. “...I think I’m cautiously optimistic. I was happy that it was only down as much as it was, but I’m still worried about Sept. 20.”
The date will be significant for the district, because that is when the official headcount — and its subsequent translation into full-time equivalency students — will be submitted to the state of Kansas. Then, the state will compute the official FTE, which will include special allowances called “weightings” for vocational, at-risk, bilinqual, non-proficient and other special groups of students who bring additional funds to the district. The state uses the FTE to compute the amount of state aid that will be allotted to the district.
“Then there’s also the high-density at-risk (weighting), which involves a percentage of your total population, so there’s no way to figure that until after Sept. 20, and that’s a pretty substantial amount,” Heim said.
Heim also is concerned about the number of students who may enroll between now and the state’s cut-off date.
Last year, an additional 227 students were added to the head count during that period.
“If we’re going to maintain that, then we’re going to have to add 220-some students between now and Sept. 20,” Heim said.
Some of the additional students came through enrollments at the virtual school operated at Turning Point Learning Center.
“For some reason, the virtual schools don’t really start to fill up until September,” he said, “so that’s going to be some of that, but I don’t know how much.”
Heim said he was not surprised by the dip in enrollment at Emporia Middle School and the Lowther Intermediate schools.
“The middle school last year had a big eighth-grade class, and last year’s sixth-grade class was fairly small,” he explained. “So, the middle school and the Lowther numbers, they’re going to vary because of class sizes coming in and out more than the other schools.”
If nothing had changed at Tyson, the district had expected EMS to be down about 40 students. Instead, the head count was down 60.
With budget cuts based on a worst-case scenario, and a 98 percent-of-the-budget floor granted by the state legislature, the immediate future for the district’s budget could be manageable. Because of the impact of Tyson, the legislature bolstered the budget by guaranteeing the district $30.7 million in state aid.
“Chances are that two percent’s going to help us out, even with the limited losses we’ve had,” Heim said. “I think it’ll be more than 2 percent, if I had to predict.”