Report (pdf) - School Management Services

students through open enrollment. The school district’s leadership has
undertaken (and continues to) measures to reverse the school district’s
more historical declining enrollment trends, and as of late, those strategies
have created an “up-tick” in student enrollment.
The Project Consultants concluded that Weyerhaeuser Area School
District’s student enrollment decline will plummet at the same (or greater)
rate in the next several years as has characterized student enrollment
decline over the ten year span of time from 1998-99 through 2008-09. In
the short term, the school district’s future will be secured as a result of the
generosity of taxpayers who, recently, elevated the organization’s revenue
cap and strengthened the school district’s funding. The long-term survival
of the school district is dependent upon maintaining—if not improving—
student enrollment, however. It would appear to the Project Consultants a
virtual certainty that outcome will not be achieved. Hence, Weyerhaeuser
Area School District’s leadership can anticipate further, future, student
enrollment decline, accompanied by budgetary, staffing, program, and
service reductions.
2.5 Enrollment Attrition
The Project Consultants examined the School District of Bruce’s,
Ladysmith-Hawkins School District, and Weyerhaeuser Area School
District’s grade level enrollments for each of the 2006-07, 2007-08, and
2008-09 school years to ascertain whether or not enrollment decline—
faced by all of the school districts in the past—was mostly or entirely
attributable to in-coming kindergarten classes with enrollments that were
smaller when compared to larger, departing (graduating) grade 12 classes
or, perhaps, to persistent, broad-based loss of students through attrition
© Roger Worner Associates, Inc.
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