While other major school districts within the state of Alaska deal with decreased student enrollments, decreased funding from the state and the outlook of possible school closures; the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District has maintained enrollment and stands close to the projected enrollment numbers for the 2022-23 school year.
The student enrollment numbers for the KPBSD, as released on November 21st, show the Kenai Peninsula at over 8,300 students and near 8,400 students when incorporating other numbers outside of the standard counts. The district projected 8,429 students and the students count has reached, and possibly exceeded, those projections.
Kenai Peninsula Borough School District Superintendent Clayton Holland discussed enrollment numbers.
“We actually have closer to 8,500 and some attends; a lot of those are partial, where pre-school students, title one pre-school, or some students taking part-time classes as seniors or juniors. They consolidate all of that into one final number and that is 8,369.”
The KPBSD state funding is based on the Oasis Count which is the official count during the month of October.
“The number should be 8,369.9; we have a .9 kid out there. That would be for our funding (state funding). We call it the Oasis Count, it’s the actual student count during the month of October. So, everyday we where taking counts–they apply their magic formula to that and that does provide us funding (from the state of Alaska).”
The area which has fallen in relationship to the 2022-23 projections is at the high school level with Soldotna High School showing a difference of 75 students and a student enrollment of 652. Kenai Central, the district’s second largest school, lists an enrollment of 452 students, 22 students below projection. The Connections program lists the largest total enrollment with 1,115 students in the K-12 programs.
Holland commented on the desired, steady growth of enrollment.
“We’re one of the few districts in the state where the numbers actually went up. We watched Anchorage and Fairbanks and a number of other places being down by several thousand (students). It is nice to have our numbers slow and steady; that’s what I continue to think about and look at with the Kenai. We don’t have that massive boom in construction like you might see in the Mat-Su but we do have a steady growth here. I think that when people find out more about what we have going on in the Kenai they’ll continue to move here and hopefully we’ll get that steady growth back into our schools.”