The official enrolment numbers are in for Northern Lights Public Schools (NLPS), and they’re on par with their predictions.
Associate superintendent Bill Driedger noted, during the board of trustees meeting on Oct. 9, the numbers recorded for the official count didn’t change much from September’s preliminary figures.
“Our outreach have adjusted a little bit, and that shows that we have a slight reduction from last year’s projection because those numbers are a little bit lower than what we projected. Other than that, our numbers are very much the same as what we presented at the last board meeting,” he explained.
As of Sept. 30, NLPS had 5,920 students across the division, 32 shy of what they had projected in May, and just 69 less than last year’s official count of 5,989.
When it came to Bonnyville Outreach School, 78 students enrolled, which was an increase from the 62 last year had seen. Cold Lake Outreach welcomed 124 students this year.
Nearly 130 students enrolled at Ardmore School, and 335 at Bonnyville Centralized High School. Duclos came in at 454, Glendon School had 217, H.E. Bourgoin had 350, and Iron River had 77.
According to NLPS communications officer, Nicole Garner, Cold Lake saw a significant jump this year in enrolment, especially at Cold Lake High School (CLHS). It saw an additional 58 students join their classrooms compared to last year’s official count of 602.
For the 2019/20 school year, Art Smith Aviation welcomed 281, while Cold Lake Elementary saw 457 students, Cold Lake Middle School had 328, 347 attended Nelson Heights, and North Star Elementary had 240.
“There’s so many different factors. Particularly in our communities that are so mobile with people coming in and out every year. Sometimes it’s harder to capture than others,” Garner said. “Given that the last time we talked about enrolment, enrolment’s been pretty flat… if you do a five-year average, it’s not going up or down too much. To have (CLHS) go up that much in one year is significant.”
This isn’t the first time NLPS’ Cold Lake schools have seen an increase in students. After noticing the change last year, the division looked into what the cause could be. Although no specific reasons were found for the growth, Driedger noted offering more programs to their students could be one of them.
NLPS is currently in the process of determining how to accommodate all of their students.
“We’re starting to look at reconfiguration in Cold Lake because we know we’re going to be at capacity, particularly at the schools in the north, Cold Lake Elementary, Nelson Heights, and Cold Lake High School, Cold Lake High School within the next couple of years, and shortly after with the other schools. We kind of expected we’d be growing at Cold Lake High School, but we didn’t predict quite the amount of growth that we had this year,” Garner exclaimed.
Driedger described the numbers as “hot off the presses.”
“Just so you know, Sept. 30 doesn’t mean that we had them finalized on Sept. 30, we just finalized these a couple of days ago. This document right here reflects the work that our coordinator of student records has done as well. These are the numbers that we were actually able to get funding for in our system.”
