The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Statewide, 14K fewer students are enrolled
Five weeks into the school year, fewer than half of the state’s public school students are learning fully in person, there are fewer students overall and roughly 3 percent remain fully disconnected.
State officials are still peeling back the data to figure out why.
“It’s hard to say what is going on,” said Ajit Gopalakrishnan, chief performance officer for the state Department of Education.
“We all understand this time is extremely unusual,” he said, adding it is too soon to jump to conclusions.
Weekly enrollment data collected by the state for the week ending Oct. 9 showed 513,853 students across all public schools, including charter schools and special education schools.
That compares to 527,829 students in 2019-20.
The 2.64 percent dropoff statewide is bigger than the annual enrollment slip the state has seen over the past several years.
Most districts statewide have shown declines. Bridgeport and New Haven both had 800 fewer students from one year to the next. Hartford’s decline is double that. Last year, Hartford public schools had 18,880 students. The week of Oct. 5 it had 17,228, according to state figures.
Stamford was on the plus side, gaining 92 students, but Greenwich saw a decline of 235 and Norwalk decreased by 201.
“And it is not just in a couple of districts,” Gopalakrishnan said. “It’s across a lot of districts across the state. It’s not isolated to one or two districts. We are going to be looking at that closely over the next few weeks.”
The data collection
“It’s not isolated to one or two districts. We are going to be looking at that closely over the next few weeks.” Ajit Gopalakrishnan, chief performance officer, state Department of Education
found that 5,165 students statewide are fully remote and fully disconnected, not having connected even one day during the reporting period. Officials point out that the number has been slowly decreasing since school started this fall, from 4.6 percent on the first week all students were in school to 3.1 percent the week of Oct. 5-9.
When the pandemic hit and all schools in the state went remote last spring, officials made an effort to put devices into the hands of all students who needed them and also worked to increase connectivity. In some cases, however, there have been glitches. Early problems with the remote learning program used in Bridgeport, for example,
prevented some teachers from reaching students online.
In all, 33 percent of all students in the state — 168,947 — are fully remote, either through parent choice, or because they attend school in districts like New Haven or Danbury, which are operating fully remote.
The percentage of students who are fully remote increased for the second consecutive week with an additional 5,299 students staying home when comparing the last week of September and the first week of October. The increase was blamed on changing health metrics in eastern Connecticut.
The state reports that 45.2 percent of districts are offering full in-person instruction and 49.2 percent are offering hybrid, meaning students rotate
between in-person and remote learning.
How many students are in either category remains unclear and the number often fluctuates, sometimes based on positive COVID-19 cases that will send all students home for days or weeks.
It is also more likely that full in-person learning is offered in the elementary grades — where kids can be cohorted into self-contained classes — than in the high schools.
Gopalakrishnan said it will be mid-November before the state can figure out why enrollment has declined so much.
He said districts will try to account for missing students who should have advanced from one grade to the next by determining if they moved or transferred or are suddenly homeschooling.