Enrollment in the Bellevue School District grew beyond the projected rate this fall, but administrators say class sizes remain relatively stagnant and below the state funded levels.
“We’re definitely growing— we’re averaging about three percen growtht a year, or a little less than 600 students a year. That’s an elementary school,” said Melissa DeVita, deputy superintendent of finance and operation for the district.
District officials had initially predicted that enrollment would increase from 19,186 students to 19,675, only to have this year’s student body tally in at 19,716.
Overall, the district experienced a 2.7 percent increase over the previous year. That number is in line with last year’s 3.2 percent the enrollment jump.
Total enrollment for the 2014-2015 school year grew by 598 students over the prior year, which was 278 more students than originally projected.
At the time, DeVita said that additional space and instructors — above and beyond the 160 new teachers hired at that point — would be needed due to the large growth.
“We can’t build fast enough to match this growth,” she said. “I think we’ll have to add some more portables.”
The growth has been a bit surprising because of the fact that Bellevue is fairly landlocked and doesn’t have large tracts of land that have recently been developed, like in Redmond, said DeVita.
Despite the growth, district officials said they are succeeding in keeping class sizes low — in many cases, lower than the state funded levels.
On average, all elementary school levels are below the state funded sizes. Approximately six out of the 11 district middle and high schools saw increases in class size, all of which left them below state levels.
“When you see the number of teachers who have been hired, you see the impact on the reduction of class size… it’s a nice positive sign of the direction the district has taken in the reduction of class size,” said Jeffrey Thomas, the district’s executive director of human resources.
While the district has kept class sizes relatively low through hiring, increasing diversity remains an issue.
For example, the percentage of white teachers, principals and administrators is more than double the percentage of white students.
To make staff diversity equitable with the student body, the district would need to hire 27 African-American, 359 Asian and 102 Hispanic staff members.
To combat that, the district has been doing a lot more targeted recruiting and trying to access networks that have broader candidate pools, said Thomas.
“We’re working on developing approaches that will really focus hiring and aligning faculty diversity with our students,” he said.
