With the first-week enrollment figures in, officials in Mundelein District 75 are scratching their heads over a head count way off the mark.
The district, which served 1,667 students in kindergarten through 8th grade last year, grew by 200 students at the start of the 1994-95 school year-well more than the 117-student increase officials had expected.
“We try to do a census before school and guess our population,” Supt. Richard C. Lanaghan said. “In this case, we guessed significantly wrong.”
With enrollment up 12 percent over last year, officials are doing their best to accommodate teachers and students.
“We’ve got some fairly large classes on the 5th- and 6th-grade levels, and we’ve had to create some new classes,” Lanaghan said.
The district hired five teachers to grapple with rising enrollment this year, but it still faces another growth-related problem as the new students make class space an even rarer commodity.
“We know that we’re out of space,” Lanaghan said. “We can squeeze through this year, but we just don’t have enough classrooms next year.”
According to Lanaghan, the biggest miscalculation came among the district’s youngest pupils. There are 21 more new 1st graders than the district had planned for, and 245 new kindergarten students where 200 had been predicted.
“The one unknown factor we don’t have a handle on is our kindergarten population,” Lanaghan said, explaining that it’s difficult for the district to track students before they are enrolled in school.
Homes in Mundelein have an average price of about $200,000, making them more affordable than in some neighboring communities, he said.
“That seems to be bringing us quite a few families with younger children,” Lanaghan said.
Speaking of enrollment: Waukegan District 60 also projected a boost in enrollment of 200 students this year, primarily in lower grades.
The district added four portable classrooms at Lyon Magnet School on the city’s south side, and one classroom at Glen Flora School on the north side, to welcome the new students.
District officials were tallying their six-day enrollment figures Tuesday.
Supt. Alan Brown, who said enrollment was about 12,500 at the end of last school year, credited the increase in students to the sale of existing homes in older neighborhoods, rather than the construction of new homes.
“As `empty nesters’ move on, they are selling their homes to young families with children who are buying their first home,” Brown said.
And so it grows: Administrators at the Lake County regional school superintendent’s office are bracing for higher enrollments, from the booming western end of the county to the more established eastern end.
“It seems like everybody’s growing in one way or another,” Assistant Supt. Roycealee Wood said.
Just how much growth is going on in the schools over last year will be impossible to say until attendance reports for the first six days of the new school year arrive.
But Wood predicted that schools in the Antioch, Wauconda, Island Lake and Round Lake areas likely would see substantial increases.
