Both public and private schools in the Wadena-Deer Creek district have reason to be optimistic on the first day of school, as enrollment numbers beat projections across the board.
The two private schools did particularly well. SonRise Christian School Administrator Todd Orr said 36 students are enrolled there this year, compared with an enrollment in the upper 20s throughout the last year.
"We're growing," Orr said.
St. Ann's Catholic School also saw a jump. Last spring, the school had 28 students at graduation time. St. Ann's also reported 36 students came in on the first day of school.
Wadena-Deer Creek public schools also saw an increase in students from last spring (1,102) to Tuesday's opening day (1,107.)
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WDC did see a drop in one way of expressing the numbers: the opening day enrollment figure of 1,129 in the fall of 2006 fell to 1,107 this fall.
But that's a function of graduating large classes in the upper grades, and replacing them with smaller incoming numbers in kindergarten, following the same trend in the population.
"Last fall, 112 seniors graduated," said WDC Superintendent Jerome Enget. "We took in last fall about 75 in kindergarten, and had 78 this fall. We're bound to be looking at a negative number anyway, based on that."
While the overall enrollment may have dipped from September 2006 to September 2007, the long-term trend is good. The total K-6 population, at 532 students Tuesday, was higher than the 512 in K-6 last fall and the 504 in K-6 in May 2007.
Enget said better marketing of the school and a more personal contact with families who were open-enrolling elsewhere may have helped, but he said it's difficult to be sure of the reason.
"It's hard to provide black and white information about why it is," Enget said. "I hope that's a trend."
Verndale public school saw a small drop from the end of the 2006-07 school year to Tuesday morning's first day. Supt. Jim Madsen reported 432 total students Tuesday for the 2007-08 school year, a drop of 10 from last year's final enrollment of 442. Madsen said he also thought the numbers were down slightly from the opening day enrollment last fall.
