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ELKINS -- The Randolph County School system’s student enrollment for the coming school year will be around 250 less than last year.
Randolph County Schools Superintendent Dr. Derek Lambert gave the Board of Education an update on the system’s enrollment status during Tuesday evening’s special BOE meeting.
The special meeting was scheduled in order for the BOE to approve personnel moves before teachers reported to their respective schools. Randolph County students’ first day of school will be on Wednesday, Aug. 19.
Lambert discussed Randolph County’s current enrollment numbers after Board president Rachel Burns inquired about the subject.
“What does our enrollment look like compared to what we thought it was going to look like?” she asked.
Lambert told Burns and fellow BOE members Peggy Young Ross and Randy Long, who were present at the meeting, that this year’s enrollment numbers show loss of students to the point that it is about 50 less less than what the county has lost in the four years previously combined.
“As of right now, unless there are -- and you know, most of the school secretaries are just back to work this week -- but if they are all caught up with the enrollment, new enrollments, transferred, ect., it looks like we are potentially on track to have lost around 250 kids over the summer,” Lambert said.
Young Ross asked, “When you say losing 250, does that mean county wide and not counting where the schools lost fifth graders – they’re still included as students?”
Lambert responded, “That’s 250 individual kids that are not enrolled here.”
Long asked, “So your count is around 3,000?”
Lambert said, “Thirty-one and change right now and that is what we have in WVEIS (West Virginia Education Information System), so I’m hopeful that more kids are going to show up and there are some kids that just haven’t been put in WVEIS… October is when it (enrollment) will be finalized.”
Young Ross asked the superintendent, “Does anybody keep track as to why we lost these students, where they went? If they moved, if they went to home school, if they went virtual, do we keep track of that?”
Randolph County Director of Attendance Rochelle Chenoweth told Young Ross that there were more than 400 students in the county taking part in the Hope Scholarship and 200 being home-schooled.
“The good news is that principals have been contacting me today and are getting new enrollments,” Chenoweth said. “We’ve had several families from out of state move in.”
Burns talked about Randolph County Schools’ steady decline in enrollment the past 10 years.
“It’s just crazy to think when I started, and that’s 10 years ago now maybe, we were up over 4,000 (students),” Burns said. “We’ve lost that many kids and it’s not from just any one area. It makes it difficult for us to keep up. You feel like, okay, we made all these awful cuts and closures last year and then you don’t even get a chance to breathe before you are having to do it again.”
The next Randolph County Board of Education meeting will be held on Tuesday at 5:30 p.m.