Students shift, but district on track to meet target enrollment

PALMER — Mat-Su Borough School District is reporting third-week enrollment numbers that are on track to meet its projections for the year.

Superintendent Deena Paramo said the district counts kids every day, but the state bases the funding the district will receive on the student count as of Oct. 20.

Last week, there were 17,258 students in borough schools, said district spokeswoman Catherine Esary. Projected enrollment for the year was 17,400. Last year, roughly 17,000 kids enrolled in Mat-Su schools.

“So we’re just 1.5 percent down from projection, but we’re ahead of where we were at this point last year,” Esary said.

Paramo agreed.

“It’s a very healthy number,” she said. “We’re glad that students are choosing Mat-Su.”

Enrollment numbers are tough to estimate. Kids transfer in and out of the district all year, which is why those yearly enrollment figures tend to come in round numbers.

But given that all enrollment data amounts to snapshots in time, Paramo drilled down a little deeper, saying that the boundary changes the district implemented seem to be working out the way the district had hoped, in a lot of cases even better than it hoped.

Houston Middle School received enough new students over what was projected to warrant putting two more teachers in the building. As of Last week, there were 410 students there, well over the projected 367.

Wasilla Middle School, from which the district drew those new students, saw a corresponding loss of two teachers. The school was projected to have 874 students but only received 832.

There wasn’t as big a change at Houston High School, which saw its boundary with Wasilla High School redrawn. Houston had 425 students compared to its projected 391. But Wasilla was over its projection as well, with 1,334 students when 1,280 were projected.

On the elementary level, enrollment was up as planned at Big Lake Elementary and down at Meadow Lakes Elementary. Big Lake was seven students shy of its projected 423. Meadow Lakes was at 415 as of last Wednesday, while its projection stood at 489.

A really big change was at Machetanz Elementary. There were 454 students there, with projected enrollment of 354. Machetanz began a Science Technology Engineering and Math program this year. It’s kind of a magnet program, drawing in interested students.

Enrollment was up so much at Machetanz, Paramo said, that the district added three teachers there. Only one of those went to the STEM program, though, so maybe the school also experienced a bump in its overall population.

All of the changes she mentioned went on recently, like in the last few weeks. Esary added that the changes are pretty much done.

“Staffing has already been set so we’ll make adjustments but not too many adjustments from this point on,” she said.

Paramo said that it might not seem ideal to make these changes at the time schools are opening. It certainly makes the whole process more challenging, but the district chooses to do it this way.

“We didn’t readjust our staffing initially because we offer parents a choice,” she said. “It’s an added value that we have in our district that I wouldn’t want to give up.”

When you give parents a choice, by granting most exemptions requested to boundary rules and thus allowing students to go to schools outside their neighborhoods, or offering alternative schools and charters, it’s hard to tell until students actually show up exactly which school he or she has chosen. So these kinds of minor adjustments have to be made.

Most schools stayed pretty steady, though.

“We have 1,200 teachers and we only shifted seven of them? It’s pretty good odds,” Paramo said.

But in the overall staffing picture, observers should note that the number of teachers is likely down from last year since budget cuts forced the district to trim 90 teaching positions. Though the district accomplished that mostly through offering early retirement to eligible teachers.

“We were able to keep our workforce that still wanted to work for us but the classrooms have more children in them, which is really a national trend,” Paramo said. “Alaska’s still much healthier than the Lower 48 as far as class sizes.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.