By Megan Kelley

Review Writer

While enrollment is not typically a big topic of conversation at meetings of the Lake Orion Community Schools Board of Education, it is one that is presented at least once a year.

Last year, during their December meeting, the board received a presentation from Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources Rick Arnett on the state of the district’s enrollment at that time.

One of the numbers the board looked at was enrollment numbers per building, which showed an uneven distribution of students across the district’s three middle school buildings (Waldon, Scripps and Oakview Middle Schools).

According to district documents, enrollment as of Dec. 1, 2021, across all middle schools was 1,511 students, including both resident enrollment and school of choice enrollment.

Breaking that down by building; Scripps’ enrollment was at 585 students, Waldon’s was 536 students and Oakview’s was just 390 students.

This number brought up the question of how uneven distribution of students at the middle school level impacts the district’s programming and operations, and how the district could approach the issue.

Though this information was e presented to the school board, that does not mean any decisions have been made, or that the research into the data is complete.

While several options were thrown out during the meeting including redistricting and reviewing grade configuration, the question was floated by board members if the district would need to close one of the middle schools, to which Arnett was confident in saying the district was not planning on closing a school nor would that be something administration was looking to recommend.

He noted that in order for any decision to be made, should one need to be, he first had to complete the research.

“I need to be able to put together possible scenarios and look at those from an administrative standpoint to see if there’s even a viable option. And if there’s not, then we don’t even move forward and nobody knows the difference,” Arnett said. “The first step is just informing the board so that they’re not blindsided down the road that we’re looking at some things.”

Though the district would not consider the uneven distribution a “problem”, they do recognize how it can impact the district in a potentially negative way.

“It’s the distribution of services. From a staffing standpoint, from protecting those things that we feel strongly about like the middle school concept, ensuring that we can still be committed to all of those things. In doing so, numbers play a key role and the distribution of students across the district is very difficult because they don’t come in easy little packages,” said Arnett.

Arnett also noted that other districts have this issue too, some more than others.

“Districts that are seeing new developments pop up here and there, they go through these challenges yearly. Or those districts that are seeing a mass exodus of students and they’re downsizing and shrinking, they have to deal with this. For us, it’s just a matter of staying ahead of the game,” Arnett said.

Staying ahead of the game for LOCS means digging into the data and asking questions like: Where is the trend? What neighborhoods seem to be growing? What neighborhoods are aging out? How does that play into district boundaries? And how does that play into enrollment? Something the district is doing on a near constant basis with enrollment fluctuating every day, Arnett said.

“We’re always researching and looking into: ‘Are we operating efficiently?’ And efficiency may look the same, and it may not, at each building. Is it more efficient to have one building larger than another? We don’t know until we really dig into the data,” said Arnett.

Though the question was floated about if the district would need to close a building, Arnett explained why that would not be conducive for the district moving forward.

“We’re very confident that our numbers indicate that we cannot close a building,” Arnett said. “We would be at (building) capacity. We’re currently at capacity at our elementaries. We have very little room for growth. Our middle schools, if we were to go to two, we would be at a maximum capacity and would not be efficient with our middle school concept.”

As of right now, the district is happy with their building capacity, especially at the elementary level.

“We feel like we’re utilizing those buildings efficiently and effectively. We don’t have room for reducing at that level by any means. Our middle schools, yes, we do have some space available but not enough space to reduce from three to two and not enough need in an elementary to repurpose the middle school into an elementary.”

In exploring their efficiency at the middle level, a lot of things factor in such as transportation time, programming and other operations. It is not as simple as one big solution and more likely, the best solution will lie in the options that are the least disruptive as a whole, Arnett explained.

As the district begins to plan for next year, it is anticipated that this topic will be discussed again at a future board meeting.