There was a time, and it was not so long ago, when some certainties existed that made year-to-year planning for school districts more like an exercise in logic and less like a visit to a casino.
School districts had the ability to project enrolments for the coming year and, subsequently, estimate with a fair degree of accuracy what operating costs would be.
But as populations became less stable and the traditional methods of estimating enrolments became less precise, the whole thing has become more of a “hedge your bets” strategy.
The news that at least seven Vancouver schools are expected to have more students register for kindergarten than the schools can accommodate is not surprising.
Some years ago, when kindergarten was half time, 35 to 45 kindergarten registrants meant one teacher in one room with some flexibility as to class size morning and afternoon. Now, with kindergarten full time, those numbers mean two teachers in two rooms. Just a few kids can make the difference.
Other things have changed as well, especially in urban centres. Partly because of an uncertain economy and partly because of factors such as changes in the postal address system, the traditional statistics-based methods of predicting where a child will be entering kindergarten, or where older siblings will be parachuting into higher-grade classes, is not as certain as it once was.
When population shifts were not so dependent on the shifting sands of the economy, people tended to live in houses with a street address, apartment number or rural route number, rather than using a post-office box, and to live there longer.
The statistics that enrolment-analysis people used — birth data, family allowance data and so on — was fairly easy to follow and useful for predictions of likely enrolment.
Based on those street addresses, school districts could calculate school boundaries and catchment areas, and estimate with reasonable accuracy how to distribute kids class by class so that some schools did not overflow while others remained half empty.
This avoided the situation in which some parents became unhappy when they moved because of a school’s reputation, and then were told there was no room for their child in their preferred school.
Teacher-contract requirements regarding class size became a factor that made it desirable for classes, even whole schools, to be populated equitably across a school district.
Another factor — and here school districts are, with every best intention, the authors of their own population-prediction difficulties — is the number of choice programs offered to out-of-catchment-area students.
To cover their bets, some parents will enrol their kids in choice programs and, in case places are not available, also enrol in their catchment-area school.
French-immersion programs are the obvious example. Traditional, fine arts and Montessori programs are other examples of programs for which parents are willing to transport their children across catchment areas.
Parents enrol their children in French-immersion programs for a variety of reasons, one of which is the opportunity for their kids to learn French.
Some years ago, a colleague and I did an audit for a B.C. Interior district where the demand for French immersion was causing significant school-population balancing problems for other schools.
Interviews with parents revealed that they believed that the district’s immersion program avoided multi-age classrooms. Some even said that, quite frankly, they wanted their kids in classes with kids from families more committed to education and for that reason, the immersion classes were more desirable.
Whatever the reason, French immersion was beginning to create staffing and space problems, and when we suggested that immersion enrolments might need to be limited, we barely managed to leave town without tar and feathers.
For all of the above reasons, school-district student numbers and operating grants for the following year can only be guessed at in the spring.
The number of full-time-equivalent children (kindergarten kids are now one FTE, not 0.5) on which funding is based is not set in stone until Sept. 30.
By that time, staffing commitments have already been made to cover the class-size requirements of the teacher contract.
The operating grant is not actually confirmed until much later in the school year, after the provincial government has had time to review its total commitment.
The rule of thumb for school district administrators is: “Hope for the best and plan for the worst.”
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
