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Registration in SD20 up for second year

Registration in the local school district is up for the second year in a row.
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Registration in the local school district is up for the second year in a row.

School District 20 (SD20) is up 44 students, from 3,767 last school year to 3,811 this year.

“That’s two years in a row that we’re up. We’re up about 44 kids, I think, as of yesterday. The numbers still keep changing,” Bill Ford, superintendent for SD20, said on Friday.

But the increase has no impact on the district’s funding, as they had anticipated the increase.

“Funding is based on what we built the budget on, and so we had anticipated being up, and so it doesn’t mean a huge windfall for the school district in terms of funding,” said Ford. “It means that what we projected is actually what we’ve got, which is good because we’re not down.”

Asked if he had any idea why enrollment was increasing, Ford said, “Well, I’ll give you my speculation. … When we do our projections for kindergarten, for example, we use Interior Health birth rate data and kind of local knowledge. We work with our principals and so some local knowledge comes into play as well.

“Last year was a really surprising year for us for kindergarten students. It was the largest cohort of kindergarten kids that we had, had in many, many years. That took us by surprise; we weren’t anticipating that. That wasn’t part of our projections.”

Ford also said that last year many families moved into the area from Alberta due to the economic conditions there and the school was up by approximately 70 students.

“And we weren’t expecting that,” he said.

Ford also said that SD20 continues to see new families moving into the area.

The new families this year are scattered around the district, according to Ford, and the growth isn’t happening in any one particular place.

“A couple of schools are up, a couple of schools are down,” he said.