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Declining enrollment continues in Marion schools

FTE numbers down slightly from this time last year

Staff writer

Officials with Marion-Florence USD 408 apparently read their crystal ball right last spring when they built the 2004-05 budget based on an enrollment of 631 FTE (full-time equivalency).

In spite of the accurate guess, overall numbers still show a trend toward declining district enrollment.

Preliminary, unaudited figures taken Sept. 20 show the district has an enrollment of 627.5 FTE.

"It's just about where we anticipated it would be," said Lee Leiker, USD 408 superintendent of schools.

The FTE number determines the amount of state aid each Kansas school district will receive based on enrollment.

"We're still missing enrollment numbers from the learning center," Leiker said. "But with those numbers added in it should get us pretty close to our projected enrollment of 631."

While the district shows 627.5 FTE enrollment for state budget purposes, the district's actual head count is higher.

"When you talk about enrollment we're talking about two different terms — FTE and head count," Leiker said. "Head count is how many bodies are actually here."

Based on headcount, 651 students were attending school in USD 408 on Sept. 20. That breaks down to 326 attending Marion Elementary School, 115 at Marion Middle School, and 210 at Marion High School.

Of the 326 students at Marion Elementary, 47 are in the kindergarten class.

"Kindergartners only count half when it comes to FTE," Leiker said.

Thus, those 47 kindergarten students only count as 23.5 students when it comes to state funding or FTE. Therefore, the elementary school's FTE enrollment is 302.5.

"We're seeing a little spike in the size of this kindergarten class and we have some larger classes in the high school — larger than some elementary classes," Leiker said. "So we're still trending toward declining enrollment."

Besides the 47 kindergarten students, Marion Elementary has 45 first graders, 29 second graders, 49 third graders, 55 fourth graders, 47 fifth graders, and 54 sixth graders.

At Marion Middle School there are 66 seventh graders and 49 eighth graders.

Marion High School has 59 freshmen, 55 sophomores, 46 juniors, and 50 seniors.

Last year's Sept. 20 FTE enrollment figure turned into the state was 634.4, Leiker said.

"As we make future plans we're still facing a declining enrollment situation and we'll be making our decisions based on that," he said.

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