Cedar Rapids schools sees slight uptick in enrollment

CEDAR RAPIDS — Cedar Rapids school leaders are considering ways to reverse the district’s declining enrollment trend, looking at “rich opportunities for growth,” including better marketing preschool and kindergarten in the hopes of capturing and retaining those families.

The district’s certified enrollment for the 2023-24 school year — a count taken by every school district in Iowa in October — is 14,697 students, an increase of 45 students from last year, according to data presented during a Cedar Rapids school board meeting Monday.

“That’s fantastic because that reverses a trend,” said Craig Barnum, chief information officer for the Cedar Rapids Community School District.

This is lower, however, than the 16,140 students within the district’s "attendance footprint,“ some of who are open enrolled into neighboring public school districts or private or non-public schools, Barnum said.

Increasing enrollment is one goal of the district’s strategic plan, approved by the Cedar Rapids school board in September. By June 2027, the district plans to stabilize enrollment and see a 1 percent increase.

There has been a decline of about 1,100 students in Cedar Rapids schools since the 2010-11 school year, according to district data.

  Buy Photo

In Iowa, school districts’ enrollment is a driving factor of state funding. The State Supplemental Aid this year — the amount of funding provided per pupil — is $7,598. This represents the majority of each district’s general fund, 80 percent of which pays salaries, and is roughly $111 million in revenue for Cedar Rapids schools.

About 400 students have open enrolled into the Cedar Rapids Community School District over the last decade, meaning they live in another district’s attendance zone but attend Cedar Rapids schools. The number of students who have opened enrolled out has steadily increased by more than 500 students in that time, for a total of 1,888 students enrolled out of the district this year.

That does not include the number of students within the Cedar Rapids Community School District who are enrolled into private or non-public schools.

Barnum said the district has to “get serious” about declining enrollment, including looking at trends of when “kids are exiting, what buildings they’re exiting and where they’re going,” Barnum said.

Barnum said the district has to investigate why families are open enrolling out of the district to improve students’ experiences in those areas.

In addition to students open enrolling out of the district, a total of 841 students within the Cedar Rapids schools attendance area are enrolled in private or non-public schools.

Of students in the Cedar Rapids school district attending non-public schools, the largest enrollment was in the area’s Catholic school system with almost 500 students enrolled in a Catholic school. These schools include Xavier High School, St. Pius X Elementary School, St. Matthew Elementary School, LaSalle Catholic Elementary School, LaSalle Catholic Middle School, Regis Middle School, All Saints Catholic School and St. Joseph Catholic School.

The second largest was into Isaac Newton Christian Academy with 111 students from Cedar Rapids schools attending there.

This is followed by Trinity Lutheran School with 90 students, Cedar Valley Christian School with 77 students and Summit Schools with 29 students.

The majority of these students — 203 — were enrolled in kindergarten.

“The bad news around that is those are kids we’re losing out on funding for 13 years,” Barnum said.

This is the first year data on the number of students enrolling in private or non-public schools has been collected, Barnum said. Many of these students have never attended school in the Cedar Rapids Community School District, he said.

The Students First program, signed into law by Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds in January, allows students to receive their full public per-pupil allocation, about $7,600, to pay for a private school tuition and related costs.

Under the law, public school districts in Iowa will receive about $1,200 for each student living in that district who is enrolled in a private school.

The approval period for this year's program closed Sept. 30. In Linn County, 1,344 applications were approved, the second-highest in the state, according to data from the Iowa Department of Education.

For its first year, the program was open to public school students and incoming kindergartners at any income level, as well as private school students in families that have an income below 300 percent of the federal poverty line. By the 2025-26 school year, the accounts will be available to all students, regardless of income.

Comments: (319) 398-8411; grace.king@thegazette.com