WCPSS Projects Increased Kindergarten Attendance Next Year Due to Policy Change (daycare, preschool)

[RaleighLass]

I received this email today and thought I'd share for those of you moving here with kindergarten kids, or those of you who haven't signed up for email alerts.

From Dr. Burns:

http://www.wcpss.net/images/templates/nr-logo.gif (broken link) Superintendent's Journal


The Kindergarten Enrollment Leap

February 19, 2010 - In this week's journal, Dr. Burns explains why student enrollment numbers will make a significant jump next year, thanks to changes the state made in this year's kindergarten eligibility date.

Transcript:

Hello, I'm Del Burns, superintendent of the Wake County Public School System.I've been providing you recent updates about the state of our economy and the impact that ll have on the revenues our school system can expect to receive for the next school year. It's not a positive picture. As I've shared, we're expecting cuts in our state funding, and flat county funding compared to this year. Our costs will also be increasing, thanks to opening four new schools, responding to the higher cost of employee benefits, and welcoming an additional 3,800 students. It's this last number that I want to talk about today. You may be wondering why we expect so
many students next year, when we only grew by 1,893 students this year. You may be asking yourself, “The economy, and growth, can't have picked up THAT quickly, can they?”
And the answer is that while we have never stopped growing, there was something that happened prior to this school year that created a one-time slowdown in student enrollment. That was our state's decision to change the eligibility date for registering children for kindergarten. Over the past few years, there was a rising concern that more students were arriving in kindergarten at too young of an age. As a result, legislation was passed requiring children to be five years old on or before August 31, rather than the old date of October 16. This change took effect this school year, and it meant a temporary enrollment drop because those students with birthdays between September 1 and October 15 had to wait another year before entering kindergarten. So, for the 2009-2010 school year, we took in kindergartners who were born during a ten and a half-month period. For the upcoming 2010-2011 school year, we will have a full twelve months' worth of children entering our kindergarten classrooms, adding approximately fourteen to fifteen hundred more children. When you combine these children with our other population growth in our county, we're projected to expand our enrollment by 3800. Does this resumption of growth mean an additional hardship on our school system? In some ways. The state funds the majority of our school system's operating expenses, and provides that funding mostly on a per-pupil basis. Any state cuts or formula changes would affect us no matter how our enrollment grows. At the local level, however, as I said we are expecting only flat funding -- which means the same dollars we had last year will have to accommodate 3800 more students.
We are leaping back to our normal kindergarten enrollment after an artificial dip last year.That dip gave us some breathing room compared to our initial enrollment projections for the 2006 Capital Improvement Plan. And our growth isn't what it was a few years ago, when we saw a 7,500-student increase in 2006. But Wake County's economy is somewhat healthier than the rest of the nation's, and as circumstances improve, I fully expect that our teachers will continue to welcome more and more new students in the years to come.

Thanks, and I look forward to talking to you again soon

[twingles]

Some people will probably hold their kids back, but that's an interesting problem.

[sls76]

Originally Posted by twingles

Some people will probably hold their kids back, but that's an interesting problem.

Possibly, but with the economy the way it is some people may not want to pay for an additional year of daycare or preschool when their child is eligible for kindergarten.

I wonder if down the road it will be a bit easier for the class that began kindergarten last year (in state students) to get into UNC-CH. After all, statewide that class might be 10-15% smaller than the classes before and after it.