For the third year in a row, enrollment at the Fort Dodge Community School District has declined.
Superintendent Josh Porter presented the certified enrollment update to the FDCSD Board of Education on Monday.
This year, enrollment in the district has gone down by about 40 students, he said, adding that the district is down by “a couple hundred” over the last five to six years.
“The positive is we rebounded a little bit — we were down about 98 the year before and now we’re only down about 40,” Porter said.
He said the Every Student Succeeds Act, passed by the Iowa Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Kim Reynolds in January, which provides state taxpayer funding to send K-12 students to private schools, may have had some impact on those numbers.
“We anticipated we’d maybe have a little bit of a drop based on just the data we collected from October till May of last year,” he said.
Porter attended the Urban Education Network meeting last week, and he said every school district on that call had a drop in enrollment.
“Honestly it’s much, much worse than Fort Dodge’s situation,” he said.
The work to address enrollment decline at Fort Dodge started as the school year started, Porter said.
The total certified enrollment for this year is 3,520 students in preschool through 12th grade.
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