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KINNELON - KHS enrollment is up
(by Deborah Walsh - Staff Writer - October 08, 2008)
KINNELON - At the Sept. 25 school board meeting, school officials breathed a collective sigh of relief that the addition to Kinnelon High School (KHS) was finished and has put the district in good stead to handle climbing enrollment.
Enrollment forecasts that prompted the addition to KHS are holding up and in some cases enrollment is exceeding predictions. When the board initially considered the enlargement of KHS, school officials cited increasing enrollment as the reason why more space was needed.
At the Sept. 25 meeting, James Opiekun, superintendent of schools, said the enrollment at the start of the 2008-09 school year is 2,228 while it was 2,195 at the end of the 2007-08 school year. Opiekun said the district has normally picked up between 15 and 20 students annually in recent years rather than the 30-plus pupils it added this year.
“The fact that we are ready for this increase is a credit to the board,” said Opiekun. “The board and the community jointly decided to head off the problem instead of reacting afterward, which would have been too little too late. They looked at the future and stepped up and responded.”
Opiekun said the district only lost three students jumping from eighth grade to ninth grade this year. Usually, the district loses 10 to 13 students when they graduate junior high and elect to attend a private/parochial high school. Opiekun suspected that an increase in ninth-grade students moving into town and not as many opting to go to parochial school accounted for the enrollment decline of only three from eighth to ninth grades. About 30 students applied to out-of-district high schools, but it is not known how many of these students actually left the district, he indicated.
Opiekun said the district picked up students in the other grades at KHS and it is anticipated that the enrollment will jump from its current 678 at KHS to 750 students in three years. Historically, the district has picked up students in the lower grades, but those numbers now have stabilized, he said.
The largest grade in the district — the current seventh grade — got larger. It went from 199 when the students were in the sixth grade in the 2007-08 school year to 202 when the students were elevated to eighth grade in the 2008-09 school year. The district’s junior kindergarten has an enrollment of 16, kindergarten, 134, first grade, 149, second grade, 153, third grade, 171, fourth grade, 176, and fifth grade 167. The district’s sixth grade has 195 students, seventh grade, 202, eighth grade, 177, ninth grade, 172, 10th grade, 176, 11th grade, 174 and 12th grade, 156.
In the early stages of discussing a high school referendum in June of 2005, Opiekun said the addition of 150 to 200 new students at the high school over the next five years was what was driving the need for the addition. At the time, he said the district would be able to accommodate the large freshmen class (Class of 2009) entering the high school in September of 2005 because next year's senior class (Class of 2006) was the last of the small classes at 120 students. In each succeeding class, the size is 40 to 50 more students than the 120.
The enrollment at KHS was 614 at the close of the 2006 school year. When school reopened in September, the enrollment had climbed to 672. The capacity of KHS based on state Department of Education standards was 588. The new wing raised the high school’s capacity to 800 students, which Opiekun said would be adequate for projections up to 2015, which was based on current actual enrollments. At the time the enrollment for 2015 was projected at 725.
A referendum for the high school addition was rejected by voters in December of 2005; but in September of 2006 voters passed a $12.6 referendum that funded a 28,000-square-foot addition at KHS, a 100-space parking lot at the rear of the school and other improvements. As an interim measure, the district erected two trailers that contained four classrooms, which handled the space crunch until the addition was constructed. The portable classrooms accommodated the swelling enrollment in the 2006-07 and 2007-08 school years, but were removed from the front of the school and are not being used as classroom space now that the new wing at KHS opened in September.
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