It took a few CORA requests, but I finally have the preliminary enrollment numbers for our school district, as of the end of August. These are absolutely not final, it’s the count in early October that matters, but it’s a valid data point that shows where we’re starting this year at. I’ll update these numbers once the official October count is complete.
Since this is the first year of universal pre-K in Colorado, I’m excluding those numbers from each years’ comparison. Just focusing on Kindergarten through 12th grade. Also note, I’m using CDE data for previous years (download the ‘membership_grade_by_school’ files). Merit Academy has many students in their homeschool enrichment program, and the CDE counts those as 50% (for funding purposes). So for consistency, I’m applying the same 50% there (for ’23-24, they have 60 students in this program so that counts as 30 in the numbers below; they had 59 the previous year).
In summary, this is yet another year of declining enrollment in our school district, even considering the growth in Merit Academy.
| ’21-22 | ’22-23 | ’23-24 | |
| Traditional Public School enrollment | 1749 | 1676 | 1592 |
| Total District Enrollment* | 2036 | 2007 | 1986 |
Here’s the breakdown by school for the same time period. Merit has shown growth, the other schools are decreasing. Note the sharp drop in the Middle School for this year is largely due to moving 6th grade from that school to the three elementary schools.
This school board has consistently voted to boost Merit and ignore our traditional public schools, and these numbers reflect that. We continue to see declining overall district enrollment, too.
If you have concerns about me not including preschool in these numbers, here are the enrollment totals WITH preschool included:
| ’21-22 | ’22-23 | ’23-24 | |
| Traditional Public School enrollment | 1832 | 1791 | 1721 |
| Total District Enrollment* | 2119 | 2122 | 2085 |
Lastly, note that per CDE data, in the ’22-23 school year, 473 students in our district opted out, and went to schools in other districts. We don’t know what the numbers are for ’23-24 yet.
Raw data files obtained via CORA:
’23-24 preliminary enrollment, traditional public schools (the ‘missing OLR’ are students appearing in Infinite Campus from last year, but with no updated enrollment for this year – they’re not attending school but have not been officially withdrawn).