Olathe Public Schools has long been an attractive school district for families living in the Kansas City area — and its steadily growing enrollment numbers reflected that. But Superintendent Brent Yeager said that trend has changed in recent years, citing the rising cost to buy a home and declining birth rates for families. “Our incoming kindergarten classes are substantially smaller than our exiting senior classes,” Yeager said. “The first many, many, many years of our district from about 1965 to about 2019 it was just the opposite.” In Kansas, the amount of funding that school districts receive is tied to enrollment numbers. Yeager said the Olathe School District is missing out on $22 million annually it would receive if it had the same number of students as it had in 2019.
Read more: Johnson County Post
