School district to receive additional funding due to increased enrollment

As many of Wyoming’s school districts face declining enrollment, budgets and staffs, the Powell district finds itself in a different position.

Park County School District No. 1 leaders are adding five new staff positions, beginning in August, that they say are necessary to handle the district’s increased number of students.

Enrollment is up nearly 10 percent over the past five years — from 1,655 students in 2011-12 to 1,818 students this school year.

Class sizes started surging in local elementary schools, and now those larger classes are advancing into middle and high school.

“It’s a good problem to have,” Park County School District No. 1 Superintendent Kevin Mitchell said during the March 22 school board meeting. “We knew it was coming.”

The new jobs include a sixth-grade teacher at Powell Middle School, an English/Spanish teacher at Powell High School and three special education positions: one teacher/case manager at PHS, another at the middle school and an occupational therapist to serve students district-wide.

The Park County School District No. 1 Board of Trustees unanimously approved the new positions March 22, and the district began advertising them immediately.

The state of Wyoming is cutting funding to schools by 1 percent, which, according to preliminary budget numbers, would mean a roughly $250,000 cut for the Powell district, Mitchell said.

However, even after that 1 percent cut, “the district will receive approximately $1.1 million in additional funds in the (state) foundation entitlement payment,” Mitchell said Wednesday. “The additional funds are due to increased enrollment.”

Those numbers are estimates, he said, as the district is waiting for the Wyoming Department of Education to release the final funding model for next year. The state’s funding model considers a lot of factors, but is mainly driven by student enrollment, he said.

Financially, the Powell school district is able to add the five staff positions for the upcoming school year, Mitchell said.

Salaries and benefits for the five new positions are projected to cost a total of about $360,000, which Mitchell said is probably a high estimate.

“It depends on who we hire in each one of those positions — the more years (of experience) they have or the more education they have, those all advance them on the salary schedule,” Mitchell said. “We did put full benefits in for every position.”

The cost for the three new special education positions will be fully reimbursed by the state.

During a school board meeting last month, Mitchell said it’s difficult to know what will happen with Powell’s enrollment numbers.

“Everybody talks about the recession the state’s going to go in, and we have no way to predict if that’s going to have a negative effect on our enrollment or not,” Mitchell said in February. “We probably won’t know until the beginning of the next school year.”

New positions at PHS, PMS

At Powell Middle School, a social studies/English teacher will be added to the sixth-grade staff.

The projected enrollment for the incoming sixth-grade class is 153 students, which would bump class sizes to 31 students per content class if staff levels remained the same, according to Jason Sleep, middle school principal. Adding a teacher brings sixth-grade class sizes to 25 students.

The additional teacher will increase the number of sixth-grade sections — or classes of students — from five to six, he said. Both the seventh and eighth grades already are at six sections.

“We have simply grown too big to maintain five sections at the sixth grade any longer,” Jason Sleep wrote in a letter to the school board.

At Powell High School, enrollment is expected to increase by 15 percent by the fall of 2017. This year, the school has about 485 students, and that number’s projected to jump to 560 during the 2017-18 school year, according to Jim Kuhn, PHS principal.

“This will increase the number of sections of 9th- and 10th-grade classes that will need to be offered,” Kuhn wrote in a letter to the school board.

The additional English/Spanish teacher will help the high school handle the increase. If the district can’t find a certified teacher to do both English and Spanish, then Kuhn said he would like to make it a full-time English position.

“We will be looking for possible additions to staff over the next several years as the increase in enrollment will also affect other core curriculum classes,” Kuhn wrote.

PHS may need one or two more teachers in the future, “depending on numbers after we see what happens with the economy,” Mitchell said.

Special education positions

Currently, the district has one occupational therapist, who serves approximately 82 students on individual education programs (IEP), according to Ginger Sleep, special services director.

“To give you a like comparison, our speech language therapists in Park No. 1 currently have 20-25 IEP students on their caseloads and our adaptive P.E. teacher has 19 IEP students that he serves on a daily/weekly basis,” Ginger Sleep wrote in a letter to the school board.

The occupational therapist serves students from kindergarten through 21 years old, she said.

At both PHS and the middle school, the IEP caseloads “are definitely on the rise,” Ginger Sleep said. At each school, a new case manager/resource room teacher will be added to help meet students’ needs in special education.

Some special education researchers suggest the caseload for one teacher/case manager should be about 12 to 13 students. Mitchell said some special education teachers at PHS and PMS have 20 to 21 students.

The addition of a case manager/teacher at both the middle school and high school “will help try to get down to that 15 to 17,” Mitchell said, which he said is a good range.

He noted the ideal caseload ratio depends on individual cases, since some students require more time than others.

“By dividing the caseload and focusing on the needs of our special education students as they move toward earning a high school diploma, I am confident our students will achieve their goals and ultimately be ‘prepared for life,’” Ginger Sleep wrote.

Three special education para-educator positions will be eliminated next school year, as they will no longer be needed with the new occupational therapist and teachers.

“We’re adding certified staff, so we’ll reduce our support staff a little bit,” Mitchell said. “We intend to reduce through attrition.”

The district is planning to transfer paraeducators currently in those roles to other positions in the school district.

“We’re confident that nobody will lose their job,” Mitchell said Wednesday.