Enrolment jump seen as ‘new trend’

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This article was published 10/01/2024 (618 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Brandon School Division has experienced substantial growth over the last two years, putting pressure on trustees to focus on more teachers, staff and space as they head into budget deliberations next month.

This school year, the total number of students in the division reached 9,700 after 326 new students were enrolled in classes. In the 2022-23 school year, the BSD experienced the first big bump in growth with 328 new students.

Supt. and CEO Matthew Gustafson told BSD trustees in a presentation at the regular meeting on Monday night that administration is confident that this is a new trend.

“The question we’ve been grappling with for the last few weeks is, is this signalling a new trend? Or is this year kind of an anomaly?” Gustafson said. “So we spent time over the break analyzing census data and community data. And we have growing confidence that it is a new trend.

“What it means is that the rate of growth of enrolment is probably now going to be much higher than what we would have experienced before.”

Gustafson said since 2006 growth in student numbers had been steady and predictable until the 2020-21 school year. The average growth each year prior to the pandemic was about 112 students per year. He said Brandon, like divisions across Canada and the U.S., experienced a drop in students due to many parents choosing to home school.

“Parents kept them home just because of the unknown. Also, movement between provinces and international mobilities was also stopped. We actually had a reduction in enrolment for the first time,” he said. “The following year, we had increased to 238. We call that kind of a bounce back. It was 35 students more than what we had previously.”

Gustafson said while growth shows a healthy community, it puts new pressures on the school division.

“It means that we’ll have to step up in terms of recruiting teachers and building more capacity into our buildings and advocating for, again, additional builds, or modulars. It does have some significant implications for the buildings. It has implications for budget because, of course, hiring additional teachers comes at a cost,” Gustafson said.

“We’re not unique in that in the province. It’s exasperated by the rate of growth. For example, if we’re growing 112 per year, you only need enough additional classrooms for 112. Triple that amount and you need three times the amount of classrooms.”

It will be up to BSD trustees to figure out how many new teachers to hire when they have budget deliberations next month. Next steps for the BSD administration include reaching out to the province for more modular classrooms and examining their current buildings to make the most out of the spaces available. Gustafson said BSD is currently trying out a pilot project called a pod, which gives teachers additional space to work with students. If successful, the project will aid in the loss of offices and other spaces in schools due to growth.

“It’s a multipronged approach that we’re taking. It’s not that we we’re just starting now, we’ve been doing this for a bit, but the rate of change is causing us to speed up our efforts,” Gustafson said.

“Schools are a reflection of the community. If you have schools that are increasing in size, it means that the community is growing. There are more families, more youth coming through… But a time when you have high growth rate, there’s some pain that comes with that.”

» khenderson@brandonsun.com