The Petersburg School District completed its yearly headcount last month and has nearly 470 students enrolled. That’s about 40 more students than last year.
That’s important because part of the state funding formula is tiered based on enrollment. There’s a funding cliff at 425 students. If the district falls even one student short of that number it will lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in state funding.
This tiered funding is distinct from the State of Alaska’s per-enrolled-student funding, something called Base Student Allocation, or BSA. They’re both part of the larger school funding formula.
The district has hovered close to the cliff for the last three years. Mara Lutomski is Executive Assistant to the Superintendent and Board and helped with the headcounts. During the 20-21 and 21-22 school years, the district was just two students shy of the cutoff. She said that made school administration really nervous.
“That would have been a significant cut that we would have had to find,” she said.
Lutomski said there are a few reasons why the numbers are rebounding.
Last year’s graduating senior class was tiny. The new kindergarten class is on the large side. That bumped this year’s enrollment up, away from the cliff.
The number of enrolled students dipped during COVID, when roughly half a dozen families home-schooled their kids. Those students eventually re-enrolled, but district numbers stayed low, because a lot of families also moved out of town around the same time. Now, new families are moving in. Several of the recently hired teachers enrolled their kids in the district, and many of the people who moved to town to fill open jobs in the community also enrolled their kids in school. Lutomski said that bodes well for the school district.
“As long as the economy of Petersburg stays intact, right now we’re seeing small bits of growth,” she said.
Lutomski said administration expects the student count to stay about where it is for at least the next couple of years, based on those newly arrived families, and outgoing and incoming class sizes.
