District 1 enrollment has ups and downs

At a Yuma Elementary School District governing board meeting Monday, the group received a report on 100th day districtwide enrollment that showed an increase of 111 students overall from the 20th day this year, but a decrease of 265 students compared with last year's 100th day.

Chief financial officer Kerry Jones estimated that the drop would land them around $600,000 less for next year's budget. He said it's hard to say at this point what the decrease would be exactly because the formula is based on average daily membership from the first 100 days.

Jones said that while their enrollment has dropped from last year, it is on the rise this year, so much so that they've recently hired additional staff in two district classrooms.

“We've also added two positions recently, two paraprofessionals positions, one for Roosevelt full-day kindergarten class due to high numbers in that class and also a paraprofessional at Sunrise for the ESS (Education Support System) resource class; they have quite high numbers in that class.”

He noted that for example, they aim to have a ratio of 25 students to 1 teacher for every classroom, but in a Roosevelt kindergarten class, it was at about 29 to 1, so they hired a paraprofessional for that class to help with the excess numbers.

In other meeting news, District 1 was acknowledged for its contributions of more than $5,800 to United Way of Yuma County (UWYC) by district employees.

Funds donated will go to support the organization's literacy, volunteers income tax assistance and prescription drug card assistance programs, just to name a few, said UWYC board of directors first vice president Dennis Light of the Yuma Fire Department.

Karina Jones, UWYC director of resource development and marketing, also presented the district office with an award for raising more funds than any school in the district and another award to Pecan Grove Elementary School Principal Jorge Zepeda for 98 percent of his staff participating in the workplace campaign.

“School District 1 has been a longtime advocate of United Way, they've been supporting United Way since 2002 and they are the one and only district that has run a workplace campaign every single year since then,” she said.

In other meeting news, the district recognized those who have donated to the district. This month's total donations came to $30,485.35 for a year-to-date total of $116,893.84.

Additionally, the district decided to approve two to three administrators to participate in out-of-state recruiting for highly qualified and highly effective teachers in Illinois, Washington and Michigan.

Director of human resources Luciano Munoz said the trip is an essential key to finding teachers for hard-to-fill positions in special education, mathematics, general science, visual arts and music.

Sarah Womer can be reached at swomer@yumasun.com or 539-6858. Find her on Facebook at Facebook.com/YSSarahWomer or on Twitter at @YSSarahWomer.