Enrollment in the Quesnel School District has now dipped below the 3,000 mark but it seems to have leveled off after years of declining enrollment.
Superintendent Sue-Ellen Miller…
“We ended the school year with 3,015 students and our enrollment is not firm yet, but enrollment for yesterday was 2,990 students on September 12th. So we’re not far off where we ended in June. We also knew that our grade 12 graduating class was bigger than the kindergarten class coming in so we knew there were some birthrate changes and some decline in that way.”
Miller says that was actually a little higher than they projected and the drop of 25 is a far cry from previous years when there were more than a hundred fewer students.
She says those numbers could still change prior to the count on September 30th that will go into the Ministry…
“We are counting students that are coming in and are at school. The other part is not every student is a full-time student at secondary school depending on the number of courses they take and when the Ministry calculates actual enrollment and what that brings to us in funding, it’s based on a per student FTE basis, full time equivalent basis.”
Miller says the other piece is that often throughout the school year we’ll get students that enroll in our distance learning program, the QDL program, so we’ll have on-line learners, and that will add to our total and we’ll receive additional funding throughout the year for those students.
She says often the numbers for DL are low to start the year and they increase throughout the year so they can add additional students that way.
