Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp.’s enrollment for September of 2022 is nearly identical to the same time last year, holding steady at about 11,430.
The school corporation’s Average Daily Membership (ADM) was 11,431.06 as of September, compared to 11,431.3 at the same time last year, according to Assistant Superintendent of Financial Services Chad Phillips. Out of those totals, 336 students are virtual this year, compared to 458 at the same time in 2021.
“While our overall count was mostly flat — down 0.24 of a student — the number of students who are attending in person has gone up from last fall to this fall as we had more students transition from virtual to in-person education,” Phillips told the school board on Monday.
The state of Indiana uses ADM to allot tuition funding support to schools based on a per-pupil amount. The 2022-23 amount is $6,235. School officials have said in the past that the school corporation receives 85% of state support for students enrolled in its virtual program.
Most of the students in the school corp.’s Columbus Virtual Pathway are high schoolers, said Phillips.
“Our high school enrollment has gained 175 students in the last seven years, and so they continue to grow,” he noted. “And if we didn’t have those students virtual, we’d probably be bursting at the seams, particularly at Columbus North High School.”
In discussing ADM, Phillips showed data concerning ADM counts and changes over the past 20 years, during which time BCSC enrollment was, according to a recent demography study, “remarkably stable.” Since 2002, the school corporation has seen a net gain of about 1,360 students.
When asked why the ADM figure for 2022 contains a fraction, Phillips explained that some middle school students from St. Peter’s Lutheran School and St. Bartholomew Catholic School attend foreign language or career and technical education classes at BCSC, so the school corporation gains a portion of these students’ ADM.
This is not the case with students from other districts who attend C4 classes; such students do not affect enrollment counts. However, BCSC does collect revenue from the “sending” districts based on the number of students enrolled and the courses they take.
In budgeting for 2023, Phillips expected a decrease of 75 students from last fall’s ADM, which means that the school corporation will likely collect more funding from the state than was budgeted.
His preliminary estimates for ADM were 11,358 in Sept. of 2022, 11,208 in February of 2023 and 11,358 in September of 2023.
He said at a previous meeting that he had based the estimated decrease off the difference between the outgoing senior class and the incoming kindergarteners.
“So we have made up those students between grades 1-12 this fall,” said Phillips on Sept. 26. “So that’s good news. So that would, while I haven’t updated the revenue projections based on that, if that comes to fruition, it will end up being about a total of $500,000 swing increase in revenues for calendar year 2023. Of course, we still have to have the count in February of 2023 and then also in the fall of 2023.”
The total amount of revenue will also depend on how much the state legislature decides to budget in per-pupil tuition support for next fall. Phillips budgeted for a 4% increase in this amount.
