Photo by Sally Y. Hart

Washington School District’s certified enrollment is in and it has increased. Superintendent Jeff Dicks says it has grown by 40 students, after decreases the past two years of 26 and 52 students, respectively. The official enrollment number is 1,745.1, up from 1705.05 last year. Of those, 1,589.8 are resident students and the school will be funded based on the resident students. In total, 153.4 students open enrolled out of the district, but the number of students coming in increased 16.9 to 95.7.

Looking ahead at enrollment, last year there were 98 four-year-olds in preschool at the different providers in town, but it is down this year at 81 between Kingdom Kids, St. James and Washington. Dicks said, “The current uptick in enrollment is positive, but we will continue to examine ourselves as a district and identify and plan for the future when our largest classes leave our system by 2020.” The current high school classes have an average of about 138 students, while the average class size for kindergarten through fifth grade is 107 students.