In case you have not yet seen the November 2013 issue of Currently Colchester, we wanted to share some important information about the district’s trends in kindergarten enrollment.
As was explained in Superintendent Larry Waters’s article “Colchester School District Kindergarten Enrollments Continue to Rise,” the number of students attending kindergarten in Colchester is on the incline despite the decline in state enrollments in public schools across Vermont.
CSD’s demographer, Bill Smith, discussed the increase a recent school board meeting, demonstrating that kindergarten enrollment has increased from 155 to approximately 190 students over the past two years; CSD had anticipated that approximately 150 new students would enroll. Parallelly, the number of students attending the Essential Early Education program (EEE) has doubled from about thirty-five to more than seventy in the past three years. The numbers may indicate—among other things—that new families are moving to Colchester to establish residency.
And did you know that towns that do not host a high school are required to pay tuition for their students to the schools the students choose to attend (the CSD tuition rate is just over $12,000)? Each year, approximately eighty tuition students in grades 7–12 attend Colchester Middle School and Colchester High School from other communities, mostly from the Grand Isle Supervisory Union.
“The overall projection is that our enrollments have bottomed out and will have small but steady increases,” Superintendent Waters wrote in his recent article. “We may not see the district enrollments of 2,500 students again, but we expect to hold steady around 2,200 students.”
For more information, please call CSD’s administrative offices at (802) 264-5999.
Your schools and your town are working hard to engage our community. Please encourage your friends and family to subscribe to The Spotlight. When we’re all informed, we make a stronger community!
