Enrollment in New Canaan Public Schools as of last week stood at 4,134 district-wide compared to 4,222 students on Oct. 1 of 2020, officials said.
The overall 88-student difference pre-K through 12th grade likely will change again once all move-ins are accounted for in figures that administrators present in November, Director of Human Resources Darlene Pianka told members of the Board of Education at their regular meeting, held Aug. 23 in the Wagner Room at New Canaan High School.
As of Aug. 23, the elementary schools were down a total of 23 students from last October, Saxe Middle School 10 and New Canaan High School 55, Pianka said.
Superintendent of Schools Dr. Bryan Luizzi said, “We all sort of—certainly, I did—expect a bit of a bump in our enrollment this year, so it’s a little bit of a surprise to see the numbers where they are.”
“But I will say we are quite fortunate to have budgeted the way that we did,” Luizzi continued. “Because of the face of the unknown, we didn’t know what to do with our staffing for the elementary level. It turns out we are currently sitting with exactly the same number of sections at the elementary level as we had last year—distributed a little bit differently, but in order to keep everything within class size guidelines, we literally had the same number of homeroom sections. So that worked out well, to just flat-budget the staffing model year-to-year so that we could meet the needs of the kids. So when you see a drop of about 25 students or so at the elementary, it would be wonderful if they all came from the same grade in the same school, and you could reduce one teaching section, but it never works that way. It’s sort of one here, two there, and how it gets distributed across our three elementaries and five grades of them. So sometimes you get lucky and I think keeping our budget stable on the number of staff and the FTE model worked out well for us this year.”
Pianka said that district administrators are “very comfortable with our staffing numbers and our class sizes, and don’t expect any huge influxes.”
“We have taken a minor look at any kinds of trends we are seeing,” she said. “There is quite a bit of movement within town in New Canaan and the bulk of the move-ins are from the state of New York. That’s about 60% of—a little bit over 60% of the out of state movies were from New York.”
The public schools in New Canaan opened the 2021-22 academic year Monday, welcoming back all students K-12 for in-person learning amid the lingering COVID-19 pandemic. The majority of the school board stands to change over with the municipal election this fall, with six of nine total seats up for election and just one incumbent seeking re-election. The change on the Board of Ed comes amid uncertainty about what will be required of public schools in Connecticut after Sept. 30 vis-a-vis mask-wearing, among other public health measures, and in an academic year that is set to change school start times in the second half.
Board members asked at the meeting if the district knows what is happening in terms of enrollment at local preschools (not yet, though the New Canaan Y did open a pre-K 5’s class that could impact kindergarten numbers), what accounts for the 55-student decline at NCHS (the class of 2021 was the high school’s largest-ever graduating class), whether families have been delayed in signing up kids for elementary school (the district is working diligently to contact local families) and how New Canaan’s enrollment figures line up with those of nearby towns (unclear).