The Lawrence school district’s recently completed annual enrollment count shows a dramatic decline of hundreds of students compared with last year’s count, and the amount of decline in just one year is what a consultant recently had predicted for an entire five-year period…. The whole picture of why there has once again been a large enrollment decline likely won’t be clear until the district team has a chance to look at this year’s enrollment data more closely, Superintendent Anthony Lewis told the Journal-World Thursday afternoon. But for now, Lewis said one potential cause could be the impact of low birth rates, which he said are affecting not just Lawrence but the whole country. “We had 945 seniors last year, and then this year we had 674 kindergartners come in,” Lewis said. “That’s a huge variation there, in terms of our seniors that have left us versus the kindergartners that are coming in.”
Source: LJWorld
