A 6,400-student drop in public school enrollment this fall is partially offset by a nearly 3,900-student increase in home-school counts, according to a state analysis of the numbers.
Ivy Pfeffer, Arkansas Education deputy commissioner, presented to the state Board of Education on Thursday the enrollment information and the results of a survey done of almost 11,000 teachers about their work challenges during a global coronavirus pandemic.
As a result of the virus, school districts are offering students unprecedented opportunities for remote learning. Instruction is online for about 22% of students right now, which is a decrease from the 25% that started the school year online, Pfeffer said.
Total public school kindergarten-through-12th-grade enrollment was 473,004 last month, down by 6,428 students, or 1.3%, as compared with the October 2019 count of 479,432. Home-school enrollment, on the other hand, is up by 17.6%, 3,888 students, to 26,039.
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"We have had ongoing concerns about the impact of covid-19," Pfeffer said about the state agency's focus on the enrollment information, which can have an effect over time on a school district's state funding.
"We have worked to share information with the education cooperatives and have been working with them on strategies that they can share with their school districts about digging into the enrollment data ... and determining what the impact will be of those decreases."
Pfeffer said the state Division of Elementary and Secondary Education will continue to ask school districts to monitor enrollment changes in each school quarter -- particularly at the start of the second semester in January.
She noted that 30% of the state's overall public school decline is in kindergarten.
Other data presented to the Education Board showed that enrollment decreased for 180 of the state's traditional kindergarten-through-12th-grade districts and increased for 55.
Singling out open-enrollment charter school school systems -- which are public schools -- enrollment decreased for eight of those systems by an average of 88 students per system, but increased for 16 systems with an average increase of 258 students. Those include the state's two virtual charter schools, which serve students statewide.
Additionally, private school enrollment accounted for about 3% of students who did not return to their public schools, up from 2% in each of the previous two years. Students moving to an out-of-state school and moving to another school in-state are also accounted for in the analysis.
Early in the school year, state and local district leaders had voiced concerns about what were considered to be large numbers of "no-show" students -- students who had been enrolled previously in a public school but were no longer attending the school and for which there was no record of the student enrolling elsewhere.
"Some of the positive information is when you look at the October percent of 'no-shows,' it was a smaller percent of overall dropped students than it was the previous two years," Pfeffer told the board. "Those very intentional efforts that we worked with districts to focus on probably paid off," she said. "We gave school districts more time to find students before they were dropped" from district rolls.
No-show students amounted to 5% of all students dropped from public school rolls, down from 7% in 2019 and 8% in 2018.
New home-school students accounted for 15% of the students dropped from public school rolls this year as compared with 4% in the previous year.
As of this school year, home-school students would constitute the state's largest school district -- if home-school students constituted a school district. The more than 26,000 students in home schools -- which are not public schools -- top the current enrollments in the Springdale School District, 21,882, and Little Rock School District, 20,745.
Drilling into those home-school counts by grade level shows that the increases are solely and hugely in kindergarten-through-eighth grades.
The number of home-schooled kindergartners increased by almost 72% this year as compared with last year -- 1,653 last year and 2,842 this year. First and third grades also saw a better than 50% increase, 55.4% and 51.1%, respectively.
On the other hand, the numbers of students being schooled at home in the high school grades of nine through 12 have dropped by hundreds, according to the division's figures.
Ninth grade lost 147 home-school students, falling to an enrollment count of 1,607. The size of the 10th grade dropped 23%, from 1,957 to 1,507, and the 11th grade fell by 444, or 23.4%, to 1,452.
Ouida Newton, an Education Board member from Leola, said she understood the increase in home-school numbers and the desire to keep children safe from the virus. She also said she wondered how those children might transition back to a traditional school and how the state can support the schools in placing students.
"At some point we're praying this will be over and we can safely have in-person school, and thinking about those students coming back to the school districts -- I know some home-school situations are fantastic ... but in other situations home-schooling is not quite what it needs to be to give students the foundation they need."
Trish Wilcox, a state program adviser for home-schools, said traditional schools can decide how to place the students in a school grade based on portfolios of work and transcripts and, if necessary, tests for placing the children in a grade but that can't be below the grade the parent designates.
Josh Mesker, another program adviser, said the increase in home-school kindergarten pupils tracks the phone calls from parents saying that options provided by public schools aren't working for their young children, but they intend after a period of home-schooling to eventually re-enroll their children in schools.
"We very much expect these numbers to level off and normalize," Mesker said. "We won't get a full accurate picture of these numbers until the end of this school year and these students stop moving around."
Even now students are moving back and forth between home-schools and other schools, he said.
"These numbers are very fluid," he said, adding that he encourages home-schooling families to keep detailed records of curriculum, tests and grades.
TEACHER SURVEY
The 10,677 teachers who responded to the teacher survey between Nov. 3-10 represented about 32% of the state's teaching staff. The 20-question survey was developed by Arkansas Teacher of the Year Joel Lookadoo and others in the state agency and cooperatives in response to a suggestion by the Education Board for information directly from teachers.
Asked about their three biggest challenges, the highest number -- 5,692 -- cited student engagement, followed by 4,532 who cited trying to master virtual instruction and 3,982 citing absences related to quarantines.
A majority of respondents-- 8,169 -- said they were teaching both virtual students and in-class students.
Pfeffer noted that teaching virtually is much different from teaching in-person in terms of planning, interacting and collecting feedback.
"This concerns me a lot," Education Board member Sarah Moore of Stuttgart said, adding that she did not feel that districts got input from teachers on how to work this school year. She said larger districts in particular had the capacity to split teachers between virtual and in-person instruction and not over burden them, and chose not to do that.
"To be clear we, as a state, we did not require districts to have a total virtual option ... so they had total choice on how to do this," Moore said.
Pfeffer said about 56% of school districts have already made changes in their instructional schedules by providing virtual instructional days and early-release-from-school days to give teachers more planning time.
Other findings in the survey showed:
• 3,457 of the respondents were unaware of the state's Back To School Playbook, intended to help them provide instruction that students missed when schools were closed last spring because of covid-19. A total of 966 said they used the playbook often.
• Teachers were far more confident about their ability to provide engaging instruction and quality assessments to their in-person students than to those students learning remotely.
• More than 5,000 of the responding teachers said 50% of their virtual students are regularly communicating with them and submitted their assignments.