Written by: Seth Gordon, Newberg Graphic

Total number of students continues to hover just above 5,200

After official figures were calculated Oct. 1, enrollment in the Newberg School District held steady, increasing by 20 students to come in at 5,224 for the 2015-2016 school year.

It is the district’s second-highest enrollment ever after it peaked at 5,252 in 2010 but is well within the recent trend, which has seen the figure hover around 5,200 since 2006.

District communication and community relations coordinator Claudia Stewart presented this year’s figures, along with some background on population projections for Newberg and Dundee, to the school board at its Nov. 4 meeting

“We’re very definitely standing still,” Stewart said.

Prior to hitting a plateau over the past decade, the district had enjoyed slow but steady growth dating back to the 1990s, increasing by 272 students (5.5 percent) between 2000 and 2006.

“We had been clicking along at a 2 percent increase for years,” Stewart said. “In 2002, we had a bond election that added classroom space because we were exceeding capacity. We had loads of portables that were in place.”

The only additional classroom space created with the 2011 bond came in the form of the Springbrook Education Center, which houses the Catalyst alternative high school program.

While the populations in Newberg (9.7 percent) and Dundee (8.7) both grew significantly between 2010 and 2015, school district enrollment dropped by 0.5 percent (28 students).

According to Portland State University’s population forecast for Yamhill County through 2035, Newberg is projected to grow at a 2.7 percent annual pace (outstripping the 2.4 percent from 2012 to 2015) to 28,250 over the next five years, with Dundee estimated to grow by 1.9 percent to 3,772.

Stewart pointed out that part of the expected growth comes from the 1,345 new dwelling units expected in the Springbrook Master Plan over the next 10 years.

“We want to make sure we have adequate space in our schools to house all our students,” Stewart said.

Stewart added that no district schools are close to capacity, giving Newberg High School as an example, as its current 1,449 enrollment falls well short of its estimated capacity of 1,800.

She noted that enrollment at Mabel Rush Elementary did reach to around 600 two years ago, but that it fell back to around 500 by this year, allowing the district to avoid having to take any measures to mitigate the situation, such as changing school boundaries.

Newberg calculates its own enrollment projections each spring for budgetary and staffing reasons and is generally conservative in its estimates in order to avoid losing funding back to the state in the case that it over-projects for a given year.

Last spring, assistant superintendent Dave Parker projected total enrollment for 2015 at 4,900, which came in well below the actual figure of 5,224.

The district has not contracted for long-term projections since 2010, when Information Management Systems (IMS) estimated figures through the next school (2016-2017) year.

Those projections had enrollment dropping slowly but steadily from 5,048 in 2012-2013 to 4,615 in 2016-2017, a drop of 8.6 percent, coming up well below the recent plateau near 5,200.

Stewart said the district will likely contract with PSU’s Population Resource Center for projections when it calculates its 2016-2017 budget in the spring. IMS is no longer in business and the PSU center has been providing numbers for many of Newberg’s neighboring districts, including individual building projections, which IMS did not provide.