State student enrollment up 12,260 kids from last year

One look at Kaysville Junior High School's hallways between classes brings the word "sardines" to mind.

The school is packed with 1,330 kids, 130 more than last year. Two more portable classrooms were brought in this fall for a total of 11.

The school added more lunch tables and scheduled three lunch sessions that run like clockwork. But seventh-grader Tiffany Carlton, 12, says it's still crowded. "Some kids sit on the floor," she said.

Kaysville Junior High and many other schools in Utah are feeling claustrophobic as state enrollment continues to escalate.

Utah's K-12 student population grew by 12,260 kids for a total 563,273 students this fall, a slightly more than 2 percent increase, according to preliminary data released Wednesday afternoon by the State Office of Education.

Utah charter school enrollment grew about 24 percent to 34,166 this fall from 27,369 last year and accounts for about 6 percent of the total public school enrollment.

The statewide data for the 2009-10 school year is based on the number of students enrolled on Oct. 1, or on the first full day of school after that date.

Enrollment numbers are used for state education funding via the weighted pupil unit formula. The Legislature held the WPU amount at $2,577 for this school year, the same amount as it distributed the previous year, despite student growth.

Ethnic minority student enrollment grew to 20.7 percent this fall from 19.8 percent last year. San Juan, Salt Lake and Ogden school districts are now majority-minority districts at 55.8 percent 55.3 percent and 54.3 percent, respectively.

School districts across Utah are experiencing and dealing with the growth in different ways.

Davis School District officials counted 65,452 students this fall, up 438 kids. And that was with a new charter school opening in the district and taking 475 students "which is really nice for us, actually, because it helps pull down our student population," said Superintendent Bryan Bowles.

Washington School District, down 573 kids, isn't as thrilled to lose roughly 600 students to a new charter school in the district. Student growth was actually up almost 2 percent but other factors weighed heavily in bringing the total down, such as emerging online high schools. The small growth, as compared to an 18 percent increase a few years ago, is due to the poor economy, according to Marshall Topham, assistant superintendent over secondary education. "We've had very little growth in our area," he said.