Official enrolment report shows lower student numbers for Chinook School Division
The Chinook School Division’s official enrolment report for the new school years reflects a lower student enrolment and more students learning from home.
Chief Financial Officer Rod Quintin presented the official enrolment report during a regular Chinook School Division board meeting, Oct. 13.
The school division had 5,889 students on Sept. 30 compared to 5,942 at the same time last year, which is a reduction of 53 students.
There are 5,012 students in public schools, 499 in Hutterian colony schools, and 191 students are enrolled in the school division’s new Chinook at Home Learners option for at-home learning. There are 187 home school students, which is an increase of about 50 students compared to the usual enrolment level for traditional home schooling.
The COVID-19 pandemic also resulted in a shift of students to other distance learning options. A total of 53 students are enrolled in distance learning options offered by other service providers.
“There have been a number of students where the parents have withdrawn them from Chinook and they've going to essentially two other service providers,” Quintin said during a media briefing after the meeting. “One is Sun West Distance Learning and the other one is called Flex ED. They're roughly half and half between those two different service providers, which means they're not students of Chinook.”
As a result of this change towards homebased learning through the different options, the total number of students in public schools is down 111 from last year.
The Chinook School Division is not currently planning any staffing adjustments due to the lower enrolment numbers. Annual staffing will be reviewed in the spring and it will be based on enrolment projection.
The school division is employing 10 full-time equivalent additional staff on a temporary basis to address the needs of students enrolled for the Chinook at Home Learners option.
“Basically they were short term temp hires, because we needed to have more capacity,” he said. “We couldn't have the teachers in the classroom in any particular school take on another 20 Grade 5 students in online learning. So we dedicated this staff member to those students in online learning for the period of time that they're in online learning. There has been some movement back and forth, but as of this point in time it still stays roughly around 190 to 200 students.”
Enrolment at colony schools has increased by six students. There are significant enrolment increases with home school (52), Maple Creek Composite School (9), Ponteix (8), and Leader (8). Significant decreases were experienced at Swift Current Comprehensive High School (-26), Ecole Centennial (-25), and Central School (-18).
The Saskatchewan Ministry of Education has indicated that the Sept. 30 enrolment figures will not be used this fiscal year to adjust funding levels to school division. Instead, the ministry plans to use student enrolment on Jan. 29, 2021 to make the funding adjustments. That date is the turnaround day between semesters.
“It will be whatever it is at that particular point in time,” Quintin said. “There's really no process to gather that information right now. So we expect they're going to give us some sort of a process to follow so that we can gather the information at that time. There may be students, like coming from Flex ED or the other distance learning programs that might come back to Chinook. There may be move-ins, there may be move outs. So a bunch can happen, because enrolment can change almost every day in terms of students coming and going out of a large system like this. We will have to wait and see what the number actually is, and then we'll have to wait even longer to figure out what they've actually done with the data, because all those numbers are just a method to distribute funding and there's a whole lot of other stuff that goes into the funding distribution besides just enrolment.”