The Juneau School District has completed its annual count of student attendance: about 4,679 students attend school this year — 105 fewer than last year.
While the difference may seem small, the impact could be significant.
District-wide enrollment determines how much money the Alaska Department of Education gives the district each school year.
“That number was based on, I’ve been keeping track of enrollments every Friday for the last four or five Fridays there,” said Director of Administrative Services David Means.
The district averages student attendance for the month of October to arrive at its count. It’s not quite the same as an enrollment report, since pre-school students are not included in the total.
The state will complete its own count to verify the district’s numbers.
Means told the Board of Education on Tuesday night that he expects the count will translate to about $810,000 less in combined funding from state and local sources.
The final number was about 122 less than what the district had projected for enrollment this year.
Projecting student enrollment is important to figuring out the annual budget.
The district will need to look for ways to make up that funding.
Luckily, it has about $500,000 in reserves from last year’s budget.
The 2018 budget also has the district ending with $1 million leftover.
“We’re going to be using the carry-over money from last year, and we’re going to be having to reduce this year’s ending fund balance to make up for that shortfall in revenue,” Means said.
At the start of the school year, low enrollment numbers suggested the budget implications for this year’s count would be considerably worse.
But an increase in the number of special education students, for which the district receives additional intensive needs services funding, helped offset the impact of lower enrollment overall.
Last year, the school district actually ended up with more students than expected, leading to increased funding that helped close budget gaps.
After several years of steadily declining enrollment that came as a surprise.
The final number the district sent to the state last week was about 122 less than what it projected for enrollment this school year.
Projecting student enrollment is important to figuring out the district’s annual budget.
Chief of Staff Kristin Bartlett explained that the district takes a number of steps to gauge how many students it can expect each school year.
However, she said, some factors remain difficult to forecast.
“The kindergarten is always a kind of a difficult estimate to make than all the other grades,” Bartlett said. “In the past we seem to lose more seniors. Fortunately, now the graduation rate is increasing and we’re keeping more of those students. But those are usually the most variable.”
That’s why they hire an expert to help figure things out.
For the past five years, economist Gregg Erickson has provided the district with a low, medium and high enrollment forecast for the coming years to base its budget on. And they’re usually pretty close.
His mid-case forecast for the 2017 school year was 4,643 — off by 36.
Erickson takes a number of factors into account.
He checks birthrates four or five years out to predict kindergarten enrollment and looks at the local economy to determine population trends.
He said the state’s struggling economy has impacted districts throughout Alaska, although Juneau may be fairing better than others.
“I certainly can’t say immune by any means, but there have been some other factors that have made Juneau perhaps less subject to the … decline in the overall economy,” Erickson said. “I think Juneau has perhaps not been quite so heavily affected as other places in Alaska.”
The final count was presented to the Board of Education at its meeting Tuesday.
In the coming weeks, the board may decide to ask the city for more money to help cover the funding reduction from the state.
