St. Paul district reports enrollment drop as pandemic moves school online

The coronavirus pandemic appears to be accelerating a long-running decline in enrollment for St. Paul Public Schools.

A preliminary count of 34,179 students through Tuesday is nearly 1,000 fewer than the district was projecting this fall and a decline of more than 6 percent from last fall.

It will be months before state data becomes available to show where those students went, but private schools have reported increased interest from families wanting face-to-face classes. The St. Paul district began the year with distance learning at all grades.

The district’s research director, Stacey Gray-Akyea, said she’s heard from other large U.S. school districts that kindergarten enrollment is down because families are waiting a year before enrolling their kids.

St. Paul Superintendent Joe Gothard told the school board Tuesday that the magnitude of some drops in enrollment elsewhere in the country are “just incredible.” In St. Paul, he said, some of the decline is due to a modest increase in homeschooling.

To determine enrollment, the district is counting students who have checked in on at least two different school days and are either using their district-issued iPads or submitting work through Schoology, a virtual learning platform.

Gray-Akyea said she expects the student count to grow before the district makes its official count for funding purposes next month.

REOPEN DECISION FRIDAY

District leaders will decide by Friday whether to bring some students back to school two days a week, starting Oct. 19.

For that first transition, the district is prioritizing students who spend the majority of their day in special-education settings.

Marcy Doud, assistant superintendent for specialized services, said the district is meeting its legal obligations to special-education students, but “we know that those therapies are best delivered in person.”

Before those sites and programs can reopen, however, the district has a number of criteria to meet. Those include verifying enrollment and preparing to serve meals.

A survey of special-education staffers found 76 percent of respondents are ready to resume working in person.

NEXT TRANSITION

The district has set Oct. 14 as the next date for deciding whether to bring select students back to school. Early-elementary students could return to school Nov. 16 based on that decision.

Ramsey County has had fewer than 17 new coronavirus cases per 10,000 residents over a recent two-week period. That puts the district well within the state’s guidelines for allowing students of all grades to return for in-person classes.

But Gothard said the district may have a hard time staffing schools with a hybrid model.

Just over 4,000 district students are signed up for distance learning for the entire year. They’ll keep learning from home even if the district reopens their assigned schools.

GaoShue Moua, a fifth-grade teacher at Jackson Elementary, told the school board that students are eager to get “back in the classroom.”

But Moua also said distance learning is going better than it did in spring, when the school district and teachers union agreed there would be no same-time instruction.

“Having synchronous time a lot more this year than there was in the springtime, the students are a lot more excited,” she said, adding that 90 percent of her students are participating by videoconference and all of them are turning in work.