School district officials in Haines counted about 242 students during its official enrollment count this year.
The total student count, also known as the average daily membership, happened for 20 days between Sept. 29 and Oct. 25 this year. It determines the volume of public school funding districts across the state receive.
“It’s kind of interesting,” said superintendent Lilly Boron. “We had several, I think 25, students that we expected to lose. But then we had families move into town that we were not expecting.”
The final count gets sent to the state which has to review it and make sure there are no errors in data before approving it. However, as the district’s final count so closely matched what it had projected, Boron said staff are not expecting to see a lot of change in the budget.
“We’re not really behind and we’re not really ahead and that is a huge relief to me,” she said.
It also means the district can hire for some positions that it had been holding open due to the uncertainty, Boron said.
“Sometimes we know we’re going to need support staff, but we can’t commit to that before we get those final numbers,” she said.
Among the positions Boron is hoping to fill is a part-time school librarian, which the school board did have in its budget for the year but had not yet been advertised or filled. Boron said there are also paraeducators who have been functioning as substitutes.
“So we’re going to hire those two positions now, because we know the budget is going to be there for them,” Boron said. “We don’t make official hires for some of our paraeducators before we know what some of our numbers are.”
Another position that could open soon is that of a migrant education tutor, which the district has had in the past.
Earlier this year the Trump administration froze more than $6 billion in funding for the service that about 65 students in the Haines Borough School District qualify to use.
“They’re students who have to move either because of a subsistence lifestyle, or because they depend on a migratory job, commercial fishing is one of them,” Boron said. “The idea is that if their education is impacted because of those things, they would be able to have support above and beyond to make sure they don’t fall behind.”
During a school board meeting on Tuesday, district business manager Judy Erekson told board members that both migrant and Native student education funding had been approved but she wasn’t sure it would get funded.
“It’s hard to tell,” she said. “They did, through September 30, but with the new federal fiscal year starting October 1, we’ll just have to see.”
Boron added that the last update she heard was that the Haines school district should have funding for those programs for this current full year, but it was only guaranteed through November.
“You have to be cautious, but we expect we will be able to receive those funds,” she said. “Next year is a different story.
At the Klukwan school, which is in the Chatham School District, Superintendent David Langford said the official October count was 27 K-8 students and 6 preschool students.
“Chatham was one of the few districts that applied for and got preschool funding,” Langford said. That means the state is giving it half of the typical base student allowance funding for those children.
That base student allowance for the current school year is $6,660 according to state figures.
Langford called the enrollment numbers stable.
“It’s enough students to keep funding the staff they have and keep the school open,” he said. “The district still has to supplement programs. If they were up around 36 students, or so, that would be a different story. But the way funding is, it’s tight.”
But Langford said regardless of the final numbers the school district is proud of Klukwan’s school, which had struggled with enrollment as recently as 2021 when it dropped below 10 students – the threshold for state funding.