St. Cloud Area Schools Adding Programming To Counter Enrollment Drop

(KNSI) – District 742 Superintendent Dr. Laurie Putnam views the latest student count as a catalyst for change, but she wants it to be the right change.

She says the key to reversing enrollment declines is to be proactive. The number of students at St. Cloud Area Schools dropped by a little under three percent to 9,286 last year, according to figures released recently by the Minnesota Department of Education. The fall was roughly in line with other large districts like Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Putnam says 742 officials believe new initiatives will help.

“We are doing some very intentional work and planning in our district, such as expansion of immersion programming [and] our online academy.”

Putnam says some loss to school choice is inevitable and not an indication of a problem.

“Sometimes geographically people who might live in the Clearview attendance area, they may actually be closer to Becker than they are to South [Junior High]. I think one of our challenges as a school district is we serve 250 square miles and there is no way that schools can be geographically located in great places for all of our families.”

Public school enrollment as a whole fell in Minnesota, which points to a larger trend that affects districts across the state. Demographics play a factor too.

St. Cloud Area Schools will begin offering Somali immersion classes, in addition to Chinese and Spanish already in place. Putnam thinks the online academy will help to attract homeschooling students back to the district.

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