ANDERSON — Since the first day of school, 324 students have left the Anderson school district.
In a report compiled by Nancy Farley, Anderson Community School Corp.’s director of student services, the district’s student enrollment was 8,476 on Aug. 23, the first day of school.
A week later, it had dropped to 8,190.
In total, ACS lost 929 students over the past year in terms of the district’s ADM count.
The ADM count, which means average daily membership, is the total number of students excluding kindergartners and preschool.
The funding that ACS gets from the state is determined by the ADM.
The state pays out approximately $6,000 per student via the school funding formula, but provisions are in place to help districts that lose a significant amount of students, Kevin Brown, ACS business manager, revealed at a recent school board meeting.
Brown was not available to comment on the total revenue lost in the drop of 929 students.
Between September 2009 and September 2010, ACS lost a total of 2,329 students, but saw an influx of 1,357 new students as well, Superintendent Felix Chow said Tuesday.
Of the students lost, 470 moved out of the district, but 759 transferred to new schools. Graduates, dropouts and deceased students accounted for the other 1,100, Chow said.
According to Farley’s report, the largest group of students leaving ACS entered the Frankton-Lapel Community Schools district.
The next largest group of ACS transfers were students who chose home-schooling.
As the school board reviewed the numbers Tuesday night, board member Jean Chaille noted that more than half of the 109 students who left the district to be home-schooled were high school students. Sixty ACS high school students opted to drop out of the school system and take up home-schooling.
Another 101 students transferred to local private schools and 99 enrolled in the Anderson Preparatory Academy, a local charter school.
The enrollment loss, largely attributed to parents’ dissatisfaction with recent school consolidation, is more than the school district anticipated.
The district projected a loss of 600 students at the start of the summer.
“We have a difference of more than 300 students which we didn’t anticipate that we lost,” Chow said.
There is good news, he explained. Since the start of the school year, more than 50 students who had transferred out of the district have returned.
“We’ll probably get back several hundred students, but unfortunately it’s after count day,” Chow said.
That means ACS will have to educate returning students for the remainder of the year, even though it didn’t receive state funding for that student.
Board member Irma Stewart wondered if some students had left the district not because of the district’s performance, but due to proximity.
Noting that most of the students transferred to Frankton-Lapel schools, Stewart asked administrators if students had chosen the district because of its proximity, not its reputation. “I would be curious to know about proximity,” she said.
Chow said the district could call all of the families who transferred to Frankton-Lapel and ask them their reason for leaving, but the board would need to incur the cost of allotting a staff member to do so.
Farley’s plan, as presented to the board, includes ascertaining the reasons so many families left the district for their education needs. The plan also includes an attempt to get families to return to ACS.