District reports decline in enrollment

Each October, as students and faculty settle into the school year, Eagle County School District begins its annual count of students — one of the many factors that determine how much funding the district will receive from the state.

At the Oct. 19 Board of Education meeting, Sandy Farrell, the district’s chief operating officer, reported that the October count for K-12 students came in at 5,949 students, 149 students below what was projected when it finalized its 2022-23 school year budget in June. Farrell called this a “significant drop” in student enrollment.

This matters because each year, the Colorado School Finance Act allocates a per-pupil funding amount to school districts across the state based on their student enrollment determined in an October student count. This year, for the Eagle County School District, this amount was set at $10,029.39 per pupil, a $732.25 increase from the previous year.

The School Finance Act accounts for the majority (around 71%) of the local district’s revenue. The remaining funding comes from mill levy overrides (19%) as well as various local, federal and state amounts.

For this funding formula, the per-pupil funding is not based on the exact count but based on the average count over the past five years. This is done to avoid any dramatic changes from year to year.

This means that the district’s total funding will decrease based on a decrease of about 30 students, Farrell reported.

“When we do that calculation, we’re averaging about $10,000 per pupil through the School Finance Act, so it’s about a $300,000 deficit in that area,” she said.

Comparatively, the local district saw an increase over its projected enrollment last school year of 187 students. This led to an increase of 32 students or $304,800.73 — based on per-pupil funding in the 2021-22 school year of $9,407.43.

Farrell reported that looking ahead, the projections for future years include a continued decline in actual enrollment.

However, this is not a universal decline. The district continues to see a transition from the east end of the district to the west end, Farrell said, where enrollment numbers in Gypsum and Eagle increase while those up valley decrease — mirroring a trend of the population increasing down valley.

This year, Farrell said that the two schools that saw the largest increase in enrollment from the previous year were Battle Mountain High School (an increase of 15.5) and Gypsum Creek Middle School (an increase of 15).

Additionally, the district’s preschool program saw a significant increase of 32 FTE. This, Farrell said was due to a great job with recruiting by the district’s director of early childhood education, Shelley Smith, with the addition of new pre-k classrooms in the Gypsum area this year.

One other area where the district has continued to see a reduction is in the number of students being homeschooled. In the 201819 school year, there were 93 students being homeschooled, 83 in the 201920 school year, 144 in the 2020-21 school year, 92 in 2021-22 and 66 in the current school year. ( Worth noting is that these numbers are representative of the families that notify the district that they would be homeschooling their children.)

In addition to funding, the other impact this count has on the district is to staffing. Depending on the enrollment numbers at each school, schools can see an increase (or decrease) in the number of staff members allocated to their building if their numbers are higher or lower than projections by 20.

Staffing allocations are given as a full-time equivalency, which denotes the number of full-time positions allocated per school. Therefore, 1 FTE is the equivalent of one full-time position.

According to Farrell, this year, there were three schools that were more than 20 students below their initial projections: Brush Creek Elementary School, Gypsum Elementary School and Eagle Valley High School. However, due to the number of unfilled positions at these schools, no staffing changes will need to be made.

“We’re look at their staffing and in these situations, all three of those schools had those positions or differences in FTE already unfilled, because as students were registering, they figured they were going to be a little bit low,” Farrell said.

The School Finance Act also relies on additional student population factors to determine the amount that districts receive.

This includes the number of English language learners as well as an atrisk factor, determined based on the number of students that qualify for free- and- reduced lunch as well as the percentage of free- and-reduced students in individual school populations. While families can apply for this program throughout the year, this factor is based on the number of applications received between July 1 and Oct. 1 each year.

This year, Farrell reported that the number was “much higher than what they were the prior year,” hitting 36% of students district-wide this year. Last year, the district had 27% qualified, with the lower number likely due to the existence of the Universal School Lunch program rather than reduced need. This number differs based on schools, she added, with Avon Elementary having the highest number of qualified students, as 80% of its population qualifies.

“Some of the schools were very active in getting those free- and- reduced lunch applications filled out,” Farrell said.