Student enrollment below projections in SD57’s preliminary report

School District 57 saw a slight drop when it came to its student enrollment, according to its preliminary enrollment report.

This was revealed during last night’s (Tuesday) school board meeting, which showed the student number being down 72 from its anticipated number of around 13,100.

“Our long term forecast does show that we probably are losing a hundred or so students per year. The number of students coming into kindergarten is not equal to the number of students leaving at grade 12.” said Superintendent Jameel Aziz.

“We were expecting a decline, it’s just a matter of how large that decline is going to be.”

Aziz noted that this won’t affect the School District significantly from an operational standpoint, collapsing 5 planned classrooms forecasted in the spring, but would mean losing $900,000 in funds.

“We still have some other counts in terms of our Indigenous Ed enrollment and our categorized student enrollment to look at.” said Aziz.

“There may be some adjustments that are made once those final numbers roll in. But again, not having the number of classrooms that we had also anticipated in our spring budget, really kind of off-sets that loss in enrollment dollars.”

The School District puts together its enrollment forecast each spring, but can be a hard thing to predict.

The full school board meeting agenda can be found here.