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District 834 enrollment continues to slide
11/17/2008 12:00 AM

Andrew Wallmeyer, MN Sun Newspapers

Enrollment in Stillwater schools declined faster than expected this year, with district officials blaming a slow housing market and growing charter schools for a drop-off in its total student population.

The school system now has 8,691 students, 232 fewer than a year ago. Public schools keep close tabs on enrollment figures because the amount of state aid and local property tax revenue is based on student counts. Together, the two sources account for about 75 percent of District 834's general fund revenue.

While recent kindergarten classes have consistently been smaller than those graduating from Stillwater Area High School, a steady stream of young families moving into District 834 has generally limited past enrollment declines to between 20 and 50 students a year.

On Thursday, Assistant Superintendent Ray Queener told school board members District 834's Oct. 1 enrollment was 159 students fewer than expected and 110 fewer than used in the school system's 2008-09 budget, which will have to be changed accordingly.

This morning, Queener said he didn't yet know what the bottom-line impact will be, since he hasn't determined how the lower enrollment will affect operating costs.

"I don't know what the total impact will be. There's a revenue side, but there are a lot of other changes that go into the revised budget, as well, so the net impact of those changes is yet to be determined," he said this morning.

Still, Queener said he is not worried about any budget shocks, because school officials were accounting for lower enrollment figures as they came in.

"Data comes in over the course of the year and you adjust. We're not necessarily fixated on the preliminary budget just because it's the preliminary budget," he said. "Some buildings are a little higher on staffing, but generally across the district we're pretty close. It's not like we're significantly overspending the revenue that we're going to get."

More kids going elsewhere

In the past decade, the district has seen not only a decrease in the number of school-aged children living inside its boundaries, but a steady increase in the percentage of them attending school elsewhere.

That trend continued this year, when the number of local students who attend non-District 834 schools rose 217, to 2,713, which works out to be about 24 percent of the school-age population.

Charter schools and other public school districts picked up an additional 243 and 111 District 834 students, respectively. At the same time, District 834 saw 134 fewer students attending religious schools, 30 fewer attending private schools and 15 fewer being home-schooled.

A major factor in all of those shifts is the growth of St. Croix Preparatory Academy, a Stillwater-based charter school that opened in 2004 with 200 students and has since grown to 700. This year alone, the school picked up an additional 238 District 834-area students.

St. Croix Prep plans to move to a new 95,000-square-foot facility in Baytown Township next year and add an additional 140 students annually until it hits its target of 975 students in kindergarten though 12th grade.

Room for growth

While the housing market has been stagnant in recent years, Queener said he expects to see significant growth in some corners of District 834 when it eventually rebounds.

"There's still potential for growth in development, it's just not happening as rapidly as we once thought it would," he said.

Specifically, Queener said Lake Elmo, Stonebridge, Andersen and Rutherford elementaries all have a number of new housing developments at different stages in the planning process.

"(These areas) all have developments sitting and ready to go. They're just not building on them," Queener told board members.

If all of those projects progress as expected, total enrollment would be expected to hold steady over the next five years at a little more than 8,000 and school boundaries would likely need to be redrawn to keep building populations near present levels.

But prior experience has shown that only a fraction of planned housing is constructed. This year, Queener said the district is again assuming only 50 percent of developer-reported new housing will actually be built on schedule.

"I think we've finally landed on a number, at least right now, that we can use going forward. We were significantly over in prior years," he told board members Thursday.

Including the adjustment, Queener said he expects District 834 enrollment to drop to 7,583 by 2013.

Considering all that, he said the school system will continue to use conservative enrollment projections when building its annual budgets.

http://www.stillwatergazette.com/articles/2008/11/17/news/news510.txt