What’s The Real Enrollment?

The West Bend School Board is going to give a tutorial on how enrollment is counted at their meeting on Monday. 

The number of students in the West Bend School District and the lower enrollment for which aid is based on will be discussed at the School Board meeting Monday night.

   Board members will hear a report from Kathy Zarling, administrator of pupil services, who will explain the discrepancy between the student count that is presented to the state Department of Public Instruction for aid and the number of students who are actually attending the schools and receiving instructional services.

   “The number we submit to the state is based on ‘full-time equivalency’ rather than the actual number of students,” Zarling said.

   A student in a half-time kindergarten program, for example, is considered .5 fulltime equivalency.

   The number of students attending the schools, or the actual head count is 7,028; the number of students reported to the DPI for state aid is 6,906.

I’m glad they are doing this.  It can be confusing.  Dr. Herdrich explained it to me a couple of years ago during the $117.3 million referendum debate. 

But something struck me as amiss…  They list the current head count as 7,028, but at the public meeting they said it was 7,146.  Here’s the chart they presented. 

Did the district lose 118 kids in the past couple of weeks?  Is the enrollment now only 5 more than last year and 34 less than the year before?