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Enrollment numbers are climbing at Lexington City Schools, Superintendent Rebecca Walters told the School Board at its June 4 meeting.
“Since the end of the school year, Waddell has enrolled 21 additional students in kindergarten through fifth grade,” she said. “In addition to those 21, five additional resident students are returning to Waddell next year, after being gone during the 20232024 school year.”
“These factors have pushed several of our grade levels beyond our preferred class sizes. I know we’ve spoken of this often in the last few months, but we have traditionally wanted no more than 18 students in kindergarten through second grade classes, and no more than 20 in grades three through five,” Walters explained.
Additional students are also expected to move into the district over the summer, which will make it more difficult to maintain desired class sizes.
While resident students are automatically accepted into the district, nonresidents may also apply to have their children attend city schools.
Nonresident students who are returning to city schools are given priority, and the Board approved a list of renewing non-resident students in May.
The Board has traditionally voted on new applications from nonresident students in June. Due to limited space, many of those applicants will be waitlisted this year.
“As you can see, our kindergarten is a very popular grade this year. Of folks that have applied, 63 students, 40 of those are resident, 23 are nonresident, so right now we’re sitting at 21 in a class,” Walters explained.
“We would prefer it to look more like 16 for kindergarten at this point as we’re waiting to see if anyone else enrolls at that level,” she said.
“Our current plan is to accept eight new nonresident [kindergarten] students, which would keep us at 48, or 16 in a class and give us a little wiggle room. This would require us to waitlist 15 new nonresident student applications,” Walters explained.
Two students are expected to be waitlisted at each of the second, third, and fifth grade levels.
Lylburn Downing Middle School has a little more flexibility with enrollment numbers.
“The middle school’s a little bit of a different situation because we look at grade levels as opposed to individual classes. We have 53 rising sixth-graders, 62 rising seventh- graders and we have 66 rising eighthgraders,” said Walters.
“That puts us at a total of 181, which is manageable, reasonable for that building. We are accepting three new non-residents at sixth grade and two new nonresident applicants at the eighth grade.”
The Board voted to approve a list of new nonresident students, which will be posted online, while those placed on the waitlist will be notified.
No changes were made to the list of renewing nonresident students approved in May.
A suggestion to revisit the policy on making enrollment decisions by June may be discussed at a later meeting.
