Crowded Boca High sees numbers drop modestly
‘Boundary jumpers’ targeted as part of enrollment watch.
For the first time in 15 years, Boca Raton High, one of the district’s most crowded high schools, didn’t see a leap in enrollment when heads were counted on the 11th day. Instead, the rolls clocked in 291 students under what was projected and 161 fewer than the same day last year — enough for some elbow room, but not much more.
“I wish I could tell you there’s a huge difference, but there’s really not. You can see it during class changes,” Principal Susie King said Wednesday morning.
Of course, 3,397 students on a campus built for 2,298 is still too crowded. But it’s still a success, one that the district’s chief demographer Jason Link attributes to a variety of efforts.
Some of those efforts were in-house. Boca Raton High School accepted only one student from outside its boundaries into its choice program, an ROTC student. The district employed this tactic with similar success at Forest Hill High in West Palm Beach, the most crowded school in the district.
Also, Link said students with certain disabilities that may have once been steered to Boca High were directed to less-crowded schools.
The most talked-about maneuver was a promised crackdown on boundary jumpers, students who say they live in the school’s attendance zones but don’t.
This is another go-to move in the district’s playbook, historically weeding 1 percent to 5 percent of the population by prompting students to be withdrawn from a crowded school, Link said.
Boca High’s rolls were turned over to the people of LexisNexis, a corporation that can tap legal, government and business sources to flag possibly false addresses, spotting mismatched documents or gaps in timelines. District staff then sort through the flags, because as Link says, “There’s homelessness. There’s divorced families. It can be sensitive, so that’s why we then check and do due diligence to verify that list further.”
Over the summer, Boca High sent 150 to 200 letters to students with addresses that had been flagged, inviting them to come to the school in person to verify that they live within the school’s boundaries or have an accepted reason, such as a choice program, to be at the school, King said.
About 10 to 15 came in and were verified, King’s staff reports.
The district is still sorting through some of those remaining flags this week, Link said. No one has been “unenrolled” — yet.
But just the fear of being turned out may have been enough.
“A lot of these were just deterred. They just didn’t show,” Link said. Particularly, freshmen.
“The telltale is 758 students in their ninth-grade class — their smallest ninth grade class in six years,” Link said. The sophomores count 816 students. The juniors also outnumber freshmen. “Had we done nothing, I guarantee you the ninth-grade class would’ve been 870.”