Oak Park enrollment pushes new high

More students come from afar



Enrollment in Oak Park public schools next fall is expected to reach 4,588 students, the highest in Oak Park Unified School District history.

The District of Choice program that allows students who do not live in Oak Park to attend schools in OPUSD will grow by 70 students next year, said district consultant Cliff Moore.

A lottery was held before the school board meeting on Jan. 15 to determine which students would fill the open seats at the six Oak Park schools in the fall. Less than half of the 635 students on the DOC waiting list were chosen in the lottery.

“The board has approved approximately 300 inter-districts (out-of-area students) to fill the empty seats we have anticipated for next fall,” Moore said. “About half of these will backfill the approximately 150 interdistricts that will be graduating in 2012.”

He added that the next year’s enrollment will be the largest since the school district opened in 1978.

Even though enrollment will grow, Moore said class sizes will remain the same as this year and no additional staff will be hired. Class sizes for kindergarten through third grade will remain at 25 to 28 students, while fourth- through eighth- grade classes could have as many as 32 students in a class. Moore expects no more than 33 students per high school class.

“Remember that these are the averages, and so at the secondary level there are some classes smaller and some classes larger than the average class size,” he said.

Martin Klauss, assistant superintendent of business services, said the 70 new students will generate approximately $377,000 additional revenue from the state. The money will cover most of the anticipated increase in cost for the district.

Moore said without the additional money, school programs would have needed to be cut.

The percentage of out-of-district students is projected to be 38.5 percent of the total enrollment. The figure represents an increase of 1.5 percent.

In 2010, the school board capped the number of out-ofarea students who could attend local schools to 35 percent, but because of the state budget crisis that sapped money from school districts, board members reconsidered their stance the following year.

A new formula was approved by board members in January 2011 that changed how some transfer students are defined and counted, and ultimately allowed more out-of-area kids to attend Oak Park schools.

For instance, children of district employees and students attending Oak Park’s alternative schools are not included in the district’s overall count, which means more students can be included in the population of the district’s six traditional schools.

“Without the inter-district students OPUSD would be unable to sustain the quality programs and services that we are now able to provide to all of our students,” Moore said. “We have been able to temporarily mitigate the effects of declining enrollment in our district through the DOC program, but as the resident student population begins to increase again we will depend less and less on this program to maintain our programs.

He added that many people wrongly believe the district can hire fewer teachers if it has fewer students.

“The way that funding in California is set up there is a disproportionate loss of revenue when you are declining as opposed to growing,” Moore said.



Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *