On Tuesday, La Crescent-Hokah schools opened their doors and welcomed back students for the 2008-09 school year. However, in keeping with a troubling trend, fewer students walked through those doors, as for the seventh straight year, enrollment in the district has declined. Administrators site several reasons as to why numbers are heading south, and they’re doing what they can to reverse the tide. But most concerning is that, as the district has less students, so too does it have less money from state funding.

In the late 90s, La Crescent-Hokah’s student population was on the upswing. In 1996-97, just over 1,600 K-12 students were enrolled in the district, according to school statistics. That number steadily increased until 2001-02, when the district saw a high water mark of 1,714 students. But since then, enrollment has slowly tumbled each year, to 1,365 in 2007-08. This year, as of Tuesday, 1,238 students were enrolled (minus kindergarteners, who started later in the week), though that number is expected to fluctuate for the next couple weeks.

“La Crescent used to be a pretty…stable enrollment picture, with a total increase in student migration,” Superintendent David Krenz said. “Now we’re finding more of a transient population, with a lot of kids in and a lot of kids out. Kids who start here don’t finish here.”

State funding is tied to district enrollment. On average, each student brings in between $7,000 and $7,500 to the school here just by attending. So when La Crescent-Hokah lost 72 students from 06-07 to 07-08, so too did it lose over $504,000 in funding. That’s more than enough to eat up the two- and one-percent funding increase the state Legislature authorized over the past two years. The end result is, even with the bump from the state, La Crescent-Hokah continually has less money to work with.

“Just as a manufacturer makes things that produce income so they can continue doing business, our ‘things’ are kids,” Krenz said. “That creates our income.”

In the fruitful years between 1996 and 2001 when the district added over 100 students, Krenz explained that although there were more students to educate, it didn’t put a financial or personnel burden on the school.

“You can absorb that pretty easily. You probably don’t even have to hire a teacher,” he said. “Those 100 kids are extra revenue to pick up inflationary costs.”

But when you lose students in small increments, rather than mass amounts at once, the same number of teachers is usually needed, but because the state hasn’t kept its support in line with inflation, Krenz said, funding goes backwards, like in La Crescent-Hokah.

Eventually, though, as enrollment continues to fall, it creates a need for fewer staff members, so the school makes reductions, as it did earlier this year. Those are expenses it can control. However, there’s still the same number of buildings to heat, light, and keep maintained. Those are costs that never go away, and over the past few years, have soared.

The struggle is that the school hasn’t maintained the funding, Krenz said. Cuts started during previous superintendent Connie Hayes’ administration when $2 million were shaved off the school budget. This year, it’s made over $600,000 in reductions n a total of nearly $3 million in the past seven years n to offset the falling enrollment and lack of new revenue.

In November 2006, voters passed a $575/per pupil operating levy that had the potential to generate $700,000 a year. Some may question why the school is still losing money when that excess levy is in place. But those dollars, Krenz explained, were used to re-establish some of the programs that were reduced in the first round of cuts, mainly relating to high school graduation requirements. Even so, La Crescent-Hokah ranks in the bottom quarter of all schools in the state on a per pupil funding basis.

“We didn’t add supplemental things, we added core subjects to make sure our kids were on the same (course),” he said. “This go-around, we didn’t reduce that. We reduced our staff to make sure we’re still meeting every child’s needs, but it might mean a few more kids in each classroom.”

So what’s the problem?

Looking at other school districts in the area with growing enrollment n such as Holmen, West Salem, and Onalaska n they all have an advantage, as Krenz sees it, when trying to attract families with kids: affordable housing. And Krenz isn’t alone in that feeling.

According to a survey of La Crescent residents, compiled in anticipation of the Minnesota Design Team visit, 30 percent of those responding indicated a degree of dissatisfaction with La Crescent’s availability of affordable housing. The survey doesn’t indicate, of the 70 percent who are satisfied, how many of those respondents already own homes.

City and school leaders have been meeting to talk about the possibility of incremental growth in the city, which might lure more young families with children to the district. But in the mean time, Krenz has heard from LCHS alums who have children and wanted to move back to La Crescent, but went elsewhere because they couldn’t afford homes available in La Crescent, which generally are priced $150,000 and up.

In addition, young families in the district start out by sending students to La Crescent-Hokah Elementary School, a school in urgent need of updating. Though the middle and high school building has been extensively remodeled, the elementary school is becoming a burden and needs some work, Krenz said. Though the building doesn’t dictate what happens in the classroom, when families drive through communities to look at schools, places like Onalaska and West Salem, at least aesthetically, offer what they’re looking for.

“All of a sudden, I see that, and I can buy a house n even though taxes are higher n for $150,000 less than I can get here. What am I going to do?” Krenz said.

What to do?

Though there are factors outside the school’s control that play a part in dictating enrollment, it works each year to update its facilities as the budget allows and aims to promote the programs the school offers, Krenz said.

“If you look at what we’re doing with technology and what we’re doing for instruction, there’s no other district in this area, or in this part of the state, including Wisconsin, that’s doing what we’re doing,” he said. “It’s tougher to get that message across if they’re not coming in the door to even talk to us.”

“But we have to keep working with the community at large, so that pride in our school, and that information, isn’t just being delivered by school people, (but also) by community people,” he concluded.