The Washington School District’s certified enrollment is down this year. The enrollment is down from 1,702.91 students last year to 1,614.48 students this year. At Wednesday’s School Board meeting Superintendent Willie Stone said what it means for the district, “This is something that’s not great numbers, now the good thing is we are prepared for it. Our certified enrollment this year is down considerably, we’re projected to be down 89 students from last year to this year. Projected funding loss is about $684,000. We’ll be reviewing this over the next month or two to give you an update on our five-year projections and our budget projections.”

Stone said that some students moved to the Home School Assistance Program (HSAP) and others moved to Competent Private Instruction (CPI), “We’ve had several that have gone to CPI, which we get absolutely no funding with that. About 30 students have gone and jumped to CPI. We did have about 30 jump into our HSAP program, which we get partial funding for. And on a good note, out open enrollment in is up, and our open enrollment out continues to drop. So, we’re continuing to level that field. There’s still a discrepancy but it’s not as big as what it was. And then we have about 50 kids that just left our district, they moved to other districts. So we have a pretty good amount of kids move out this year, so we didn’t have that big number of students move in that we’ve had in the past.”

He said the district’s $8 million spending authority gives the district “room to be safe” as long as it isn’t a continual trend. Elementary Principal Adam Miller added that this year’s kindergarten class is smaller than last year’s class. Stone said that budgeting and five-year plan projections will be brought back to the board for discussion.