D-51 enrollment decrease equals smaller budget

Enrollment numbers for School District 51 are down slightly from last year. KJCT spoke with district officials on Wednesday to learn what the impact will be to this year's budget.

The school district does a head count every year on October 1 to set the enrollment for the school year. Funding is based off of enrollment numbers.

For 2012, there are 114 fewer students district-wide. The majority of the decrease, 2.7%, came from high schools.

Middle school enrollment is down 1.55% and elementary schools had the smallest drop in students, with only a 0.5% decrease.

"It does impact our budget, we did forecast to be down, but we're down a little bit more than we had anticipated, and so we'll be re-adopting a budget that has about $300,000 less in spending in it," said Melissa Callahan DeVita, Chief Operations Officer for District 51.

DeVita said much of the decline is based off of unemployment numbers in Mesa County. She said families move for jobs so they were anticipating a drop in enrollment.

But DeVita doesn't expect low enrollment to last much longer because Mesa County is cyclical, meaning it takes longer for the recession to hit us, but also takes longer for us to climb out of the rut.

DeVita expects that when the local economy begins to rebound, enrollment numbers will follow suit.