Mike Wolanin | The Republic An exterior view of the Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation administration building in Columbus, Ind., Thursday, Sept. 29, 2022.
Enrollment in Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation dropped this fall after defying enrollment predictions last year.
Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation (BCSC) school board members on Monday night will hear information about the district’s average daily membership (ADM), which dropped from 11,396 in Oct. 2024 to 11,171 this October.
The 225 student decrease is the largest dip the district has seen since a drop of 148 students in 2009-10 when International Charter School of Columbus opened, only to later close in 2013-14.
The district is basing future ADM projections upon a demographic study it commissioned in 2016 and updated in 2021. The school corporation has received preliminary information regarding another update to the study from consultant Susan Brudvig. Brudvig was charged with conducting the 2021 update. The latest demographic study is not yet finalized.
Part of the drop had been anticipated because the current kindergarten class of 762 students is much less than the outgoing 2024 senior cohort of 879 students. Increasingly smaller kindergarten cohorts is a trend seen across the state.
But BCSC officials say that another reason is an increased number of junior students graduating early because of the help of the team cohort model, which has the aim of making sure each student gets consistent, personalized guidance for all four years of their high school experience. Cohort teams — made up of an assistant principal, guidance counselor, academic coach and administrative assistant — meet weekly to monitor academic progress, attendance and engagement. The teams proactively identify students who may be off-track and put together supports to help them course correct.
There has also been a rather significant number of students that have transferred out of Columbus Virtual Pathways (CVP) to go to other online options, which BCSC officials said is due to measures the district is undertaking to increase accountability of students in the program.
Average daily membership is used by the Indiana Department of Education to allocate state funding to go towards school district’s education funds, which are used to pay for things like teacher salaries and classroom materials.
The decline in ADM means the district is down about $1.65 million in state supported tuition towards the education fund.
This year’s senior cohort lost 62 students between this year and the group’s junior year. That number was a bit of a surprise, BCSC officials said, but found after digging deeper that it’s in part due to 40 students who graduated at the end of their junior years.
There were 29 students from East that graduated early and 11 at North, according to the data. At least a portion of those had intentions to perhaps even drop out of school to begin working, and their team cohort advisers put them in a position where they could get all their credits done early to do so, BCSC officials said.
Enrollment in CVP decreased 61 students between this year and last to 161 students, continuing a trend of declining enrollment since an apex of 458 students in September of 2021 in the aftermath of the pandemic.
There has been a rise in transfers out of CVP to other newly opened online programs, the data showed. Part of the reason for that is a change driven by the cohort teams about a year-and-a-half ago where the district started to clamp down on expectations, ensuring that students in CVP really learn best online rather than in person and otherwise increasing accountability.
But when team cohort leaders would say that a given student would learn best in-person rather than in CVP, oftentimes families would just withdraw the student from BCSC and enroll them in another online program instead of returning in-person, according to BCSC officials.
Across BCSC’s 11 elementary schools ADM is down 145 students from last year, while ADM in the district’s two middle schools is up 21 students.
The ADM counts for BCSC’s high schools as of this fall are 1,201, 2,040 and 341 at East, North and CSA New Tech respectively. East’s count is up 8 students while North is down 35 students. The count at New Tech is down 12 students.
