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District staff brief board on enrollment trends, open‑enrollment numbers and financial impacts
Summary
District staff presented a detailed briefing on enrollment trends and open enrollment on Jan. 14: resident enrollment has declined in recent years, the district enrolls 240 open‑enrolled students (about 12.5% of enrollment), and per‑pupil state base revenue and estimated reimbursements make financial impacts complex.
Shorewood School District staff gave a detailed presentation Jan. 14 on enrollment trends, the role of open enrollment and the program’s financial effects on district operations.
Heather (district staff) told the board the district’s total enrollment for the current school year is roughly 1,917 students, with about 1,675 resident students. The district currently has 240 open‑enrolled students (students who live outside the district and attend Shorewood public schools), comprising about 12.5% of total enrollment; 83 of those students reside inside the Milwaukee city limits. The district has 27 residents who open‑enroll out to other public districts.
Heather summarized cohort trends and class sizes: the district’s average cohort size across grades has fallen from about 157 students in 2017 to about 141 in the latest year, driven by smaller elementary cohorts and relatively larger high school classes. At the elementary level the district’s simple average enrollment-per-class metric is roughly 22.2 students; intermediate-level section averages are about 20, and high school sections average about 22.7, Heather said.
On the financial side, Heather noted the state base revenue per student for the current year is $12,464. Frontline analytics (the district’s data vendor) listed an estimated reimbursement for open‑enrollment students at $8,962 per student; the district’s projected per‑student operating cost was about $16,211 for the current year. Heather emphasized that “there’s no one answer to the financial impact” because the net effect depends on how seats and classes are configured. She gave examples: adding three open‑enrolled students to an existing elementary class could increase operating revenue by roughly $26,886 while marginal instructional materials might cost about $300 per student; conversely, adding enough open‑enrolled students to create an additional section raises staff and school‑level costs and can change the per‑resident cost calculus.
Board members asked about demographic impacts of open enrollment. Heather said OPAL and district registration show open‑enrolled students have somewhat different demographic mixes than residents—for example, special education (IEP) rates and multilingual learner rates differ modestly in the open‑enrolled cohort—and cautioned the district’s data sources do not perfectly align (OPAL, Frontline, DPI and local registration sometimes classify students differently). Heather also noted the district lacks precise public data on private‑school enrollments or exact counts of homeschooled students, though she said homeschooling numbers rose after the pandemic and that recent counts appearing in district systems were small.
Board members and staff discussed how open enrollment inflows have helped the district cover fixed overhead costs in many cases but that the arithmetic depends on configuration: “When we’re adding students to a class where we already have a teacher ... it is largely net positive,” Heather said. She said the district will finalize enrollment projections and present a recommendation on open enrollment seats for the 2025–26 school year at the board meeting on Jan. 28.
No vote was taken on open‑enrollment policy at the Jan. 14 meeting; the board asked staff to return a formal recommendation for the Jan. 28 meeting.
