Enrollment counts

Enrollment numbers were close to projections, with Jay County’s number slightly lower than expected and South Adams’ slightly higher.
Jay School Corporation reported an average daily membership (ADM) of 3,338 — nearly identical to last fall, but down 15 from the February number it had hoped to sustain — on Friday, which marked the count day for public schools in Indiana. The count determines how much money, which is distributed on a per-student basis at about $6,000 each, schools will get from the state.
“We’re down a few students from what we were in February,” said Jay Schools superintendent Tim Long. “It’s a continuing trend of loss in enrollment.”
South Adams came in at 1,264, down 24 students from fall 2013. Superintendent Scott Litwiller had estimated enrollment at 1,250 after seeing a drop of more than 70 students between the fall and spring count dates during the 2013-14 school year.
The school system’s enrollment fluctuates between the fall and spring because of migrant students.
“I’m glad we’re over the estimate,” he said. “I would be happier if we had increased over last September.”
The declines at both schools continued a long-term trend.
Jay County had an ADM (kindergarteners count as one-half student for the funding count) of more than 3,800 in 1999 and was still at 3,783 on the 2005 count day. But enrollment has fallen by about 11 percent since then, which included a drop of nearly 250 from 2006 to ’09.
South Adams’ number has slipped by nearly 8 percent during the same span.
In the current system that went into effect last year, the ADM counts — one each in September and February — have an immediate effect on school funding. Nearly all general fund money for Indiana schools comes from the state.
That system has forced administrators and school boards to play a bit of a guessing game, trying to project what their enrollment will be in order to make staffing decisions and plan budgets.
“It’s just part of the nature of the new funding formula and what we have to deal with,” said Long. “Financially, it’s a much tougher environment to deal with today even than it was even three or four years ago. That’s not a Jay County issue, that’s a state of Indiana issue.”
South Adams was hit especially hard in February, when its enrollment dropped by 76 students from September 2013.
Part of that was expected with the departure of migrant students, but the school system also lost 32 non-migrants.
“Many of the moves were not just to a neighboring school,” Litwiller said. “They were out of the county, some of them even out of the state. I think we had a couple of families that were out of the Midwest even.”
That left administrators and the school board scrambling to find ways to cut more than $90,000 in spending during the second semester.
While Litwiller said he believes having two count days during the year is fair, both he and Long noted that they would like the state legislature to amend the current rules to allow time to react to funding changes.
Litwiller suggested a system in which those changes would be delayed by a semester.
“That gives us a few months to plan,” he said. “The way it’s set up now, schools are making commitments to staff, to programs, and we’re doing that in March, April and May, and we don’t know what are funding will be for the next school year. And we know that it could change between the first semester and second semester.
“Right now it’s all a guessing game.”