Growth is taxing Utah's schools

A Beehive State baby boom has hit some school districts hard.

But if educators think it's bad now, just wait another eight years.

"This is the beginning," Patty Murphy, school statistics specialist for the State Office of Education, said Thursday. "I do believe districts have prepared the best they can for the growth, but it's a matter of how much money is going to be available to accommodate that growth."

The state has released its fall head counts. The growth trend has been budding for a couple of years and is expected to spike before the decade ends.

The state took in 3,342 new students this fall, bringing total enrollment to 481,143 students, State Office of Education numbers show. Roll books are expected to swell to around 575,000 students by 2010.

Nebo School District took in 1,008 of those students, bringing its enrollment to 23,078. That's 4.6 percent growth — the state's second highest.

Topping the relative growth ladder is Tooele School District, which grew 5.5 percent to 10,034 students, continuing a long established growth pattern.

The district opened three new elementaries and redrew boundaries for this school year to accommodate the growth, highest in Tooele city's northeast, business administrator Richard Tolley said. It also may have to alter boundaries next year.

Not all districts are growing, however. Granite School District lost nearly 1,000 students this fall, or 1.4 percent of its students. Daggett School District lost 17 students, or 11.5 percent of its schoolchildren.

Next year could bring more of the same.

Utah schools can expect to add 4,800 new desks next fall. That would be the biggest growth spurt since 1993, when schools took in 7,400 new kids.

While Tooele is expected to grow another 5.6 percent, Wasatch School District is projected to grow even more. Enrollment in that 3,900-student district is expected to increase by 6.7 percent next year.

Wasatch is working to buy property for new schools and strengthening partnerships with colleges to attract top teachers to its schools, Superintendent Terry Shoemaker said. It also raised property taxes by more than $1 million last year to make ends meet.

"We hope to maintain reasonable class sizes, but we're going to need the state to help us," Shoemaker said. "If we continue to cut public school budgets, that could be problematic."