SOUTH BEND — South Bend Community School Corp. officials said this week they know they’ll have to make adjustments, after losing 827 students this school year. But at this time, they aren’t saying exactly what they’ll be.
“We’re not necessarily surprised at these (enrollment) numbers,” Superintendent Carole Schmidt told the school board on Monday. “We had a new charter school come into the community and that’s where the majority of our kids went,” she said of Success Academy, a kindergarten through sixth-grade school located at the old LaSalle Square shopping center. Furthermore, she said, now “some of the outlying districts are sending buses into our district to pick up kids.”
As a result of the loss of students, Schmidt told the board, class sizes in South Bend are relatively small. But, she intends to wait until the second official student count day in February to make any reductions or adjustments because often — 50 percent of the time over the past five years, according to one South Bend administrator — resident students who leave the district for another school, end up returning.
“We fully expect we will have a number of the students come back because of the quality of our programs,” Schmidt said.
A demographer told The Tribune for an article two weeks ago that South Bend schools, because of its enrollment losses in recent years, will likely have to consider “right-sizing” options in coming months.
At the time, however, school board president Jay Caponigro said there are no immediate plans for closing buildings or redistricting.