Beattie Elementary, Sept. 10 (Image Credit: CFJC Today)

By James Peters

BACK TO SCHOOL

School enrollment down, online enrollment skyrockets in Kamloops-Thompson School District

Sep 15, 2020 | 5:11 PM

KAMLOOPS — The Kamloops-Thompson School District is reporting significant enrollment decline in its brick-and-mortar schools — but enrollment in its online program has skyrocketed.

New numbers released Tuesday (Sept. 15) show 13,818 full-time equivalent (FTE) students registered in schools as of last Friday.

Superintendent Terry Sullivan says that represents about 94 per cent of expected students and has likely risen in the days since.

“We had more students come back to school (Monday and Tuesday), so I think we’re over the 95 per cent that we originally projected,” Sullivan told CFJC Today. “Students are going to come back. We staffed our schools for certain numbers and we believe that, eventually when this is all over, all of these students are going to come back to their neighbourhood schools — some sooner than later.”

The total of 13,818 is down by more than 827 FTE spots since Sept. 11 of 2019, a decline of about six per cent. Sullivan says that doesn’t worry him, even though school districts are funded on a per-student basis.

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“My previous tour here — I was here for 15 years and I never had a single year when we didn’t have enrollment decline. We always had severe cash pressures in a number of ways,” said Sullivan. “We built a number of new programs in those years, too, that are still with us — that have endured despite those challenges.”

Enrollment in the @KOOL program has increased from 186 FTE students to 623, up by 234 per cent.

Sullivan says he expects many of those students to eventually migrate back to their neighbourhood schools. He adds the @KOOL program has also seen a lot of enrollment from districts that do not offer online-only programs.