Last year the district made some changes to the Southeast attendance boundary in an effort to reduce overcrowding. This year enrollment numbers are down significantly.
“What we did is we took a portion of the southeast boundary, and it was there were small slivers that feed into Coleman Middle School, a portion of the Adams Elementary Boundary College elementary boundary as well as Price Harris and Jackson. And so that little sliver we moved over and we assigned it to heights instead of Southeast High School,” said Fabian Armendariz, USD 259 division director of operations.
Armendariz says the boundary change removed a total of around 300 school-age children from the Southeast area.
“Of those 300 students last year there were 260 that were at Southeast High School. This year there’s only 111, so we’re starting to see that gradual decline, which is helping enrollment at Southeast High School,” Armendariz said.
When interviewed earlier this year about the decrease in population at Southeast, Armendariz wasn’t able to attribute the decrease entirely to the change in boundaries. While he now says that was the primary cause of the decrease, there are other factors that contributed as well.
“We’ve lost a significant number of kids, especially post COVID and part of that as a variety of reasons. Some of it is families are making different choices, but also birth rates are significantly down from prior. As I compared birth rates in in the Wichita boundary area, it’s there’s about a decline of 16% in the number of birth rates from 2012 to currently 2021, which is the last day last release of birthday rate data that we have currently,” Armendariz said.
The district is hopeful that the changes they’ve made will help keep the school from getting as overcrowded as it’s been in the past.
“We’re working on a facility master planning process, so we’re going to embed some of these enrollment forecasts into that facility master planning process, so that we can make some decisions long term and that’s really kind of our intent behind this is to be intentional versus last year,” Armendariz said.
