School enrollment rising in suburbs as it falls in Wichita

Several Wichita-area suburban school districts are reporting enrollment increases as Wichita schools marked a second straight year of declining enrollment.

This year’s preliminary head count in Andover was 5,294, up 154 students from last year, officials said.

Derby’s unofficial enrollment was 6,641, up 59 students; Valley Center’s was 2,905, up 37; and Maize’s enrollment was 7,345, up 12 students.

Officials in Goddard and Haysville have not yet released this year’s numbers.

Each year in September, students statewide are counted for their schools’ official enrollments.

Prior to 2014, state funding was based on full-time equivalency numbers garnered from the official count. Under the block-grant school funding law, however, school funding has been frozen for two years based on the 2014-15 enrollment numbers.

In Wichita, the state’s largest school district, enrollment was down 572 students this year – about 1 percent. Officials said the decline was related to cost-cutting measures, including the denial of out-of-district students and the consolidation of alternative high school programs.

Demographics in Wichita schools also are changing. This fall, for the first time, the number of Hispanic students exceeded the number of non-Hispanic whites to become the largest ethnic group in the district.

The National Center for Education Statistics has predicted that school enrollment across the country will hit record levels every year through 2025, reflecting expected increases in the size of the school-age population.

This story was originally published October 5, 2016 at 3:57 PM with the headline "School enrollment rising in suburbs as it falls in Wichita."