As the Sea to Sky School District continues to grow, the school board has been working on predicting how many students will join them for next school year.
At the Feb. 13 school board meeting, assistant superintendent Paul Lorette said so far the district had 244 registrations for English kindergarten and 76 for incoming kindergarten students going into French immersion. Only Squamish offers early French immersion, while Whistler and Pemberton students can opt into the language program in later grades.
"We're not quite at our projections yet, but that's normal for this time of year," Lorette said. "Just last week there were another 10 students added to the list. Every week there's more students registering. That will continue to grow probably right up until almost September."
Kindergarten and Squamish's early French immersion registration opened a few weeks ago. Late French immersion registration for Whistler and Pemberton is Feb. 22.
Each school in the district has sent in their completed registrations, and software helps project enrolment stats based on birthrates, new housing developments and trends in the geographical area, as well as historic projections based on headcount. It's broken down into English and French programs.
The challenge of basing projections off of developments, secretary-treasurer Mohammed Azim said, is the school district doesn't know how many units in a housing project have sold and how many of those units will have school-age children in them. In Squamish, the district can see permits ready to build, those in the approval process and the permits applying for rezoning. The software's formula takes this information into account to help create the projection.
Superintendent Lisa McCullough said kindergarten registration can be the most volatile enrolment to predict, topped by the number of families leaving and moving into the Sea to Sky Corridor.
"All I can share right now is yes, we're growing. But at the same time, we do want to be conservative," Azim said in his presentation. "We'll find out on September 30 what the actual numbers are, so we want to be conservative to mitigate some of our risk."
Submitting projected enrolment is the beginning of the budgeting process, Azim said. Next, they will determine class sizes, restored language requirements and incoming funding.
"We don't want to be overzealous and then say we need more money and have to go and peel money back later," McCullough said.
"It's easier to hire than it is to lay off," vice-chair Ian Kent added.
However, Kent also warned they don't want to be too conservative, since the school board is ordering portables for schools in Squamish and Whistler. McCullough said not to worry if there are extra children, as they can be accommodated if need be in multipurpose rooms, libraries, and gymnasiums.
The finalized projection numbers were sent to the ministry on Feb. 15, and presented to the next school board meeting in March.
