Cloquet enrollment still shrinking

Enrollment at Cloquet Schools is up from the end of the previous school year, but lower than numbers at the start of last year, superintendent Michael Cary told school board members Monday.

Cary said he has been digging into birth rates in the Cloquet area going back four to eight years, and it seems the decline in numbers is more about fewer babies being born and less about students choosing other school districts.

“We appear to be bringing in smaller and smaller cohorts of young children each time,” Cary said. “It looks like the number of kids in the community is shrinking. It has been for a while.”

At around 166 students, last year’s kindergarten class was the smallest group other than during Covid, and this year is even smaller, at 158, he said.

At the same time, some of the largest classes are moving through and out of the school district.

Still he said, numbers of students in most classes have been growing from kindergarten through middle school, before falling during the high school years.

“We know we also lose 6 to 7 percent of our kids at the high school level annually — they often go to CAAEP (Cloquet Area Alternative Education Program) or other programs,” he said. According to the enrollment report from the end of the first week, Cloquet schools reported a total of 2,467 students. That number is broken down by school below:

Churchill Elementary: 352

Washington Elementary: 501

Cloquet Middle School: 758

Cloquet High School: 772

Cloquet Area Alternative Education Program (CAAEP): 84

The numbers would be worse, Cary said, except Cloquet draws in a good number of students from outside the district through open enrollment.

“We’ve gained kids coming in [to the district] versus going out over the last few years compared to what they were 5,6,7 years ago. So the records don’t appear to show resident kids leaving and going other places. It’s just fewer kids.”

“I think we’re going to have to prepare for the fact that we’re going to be a smaller school district in the future than what we are right now, if birth rates and number of kids in the area stay down,” Cary said.

State aid is distributed on a per-student basis, so declining enrollment has a strong financial impact on school districts.

Policy debate

With only one meeting left before he and his spouse move to North Dakota, school board member Ken Scarbrough considered making a statement vote Monday against a policy that continues to allow biological males who identify as female to participate in girls sports and vice versa.

“That’s something I’ve been against from the start,” said Scarbrough, a retired Cloquet school superintendent. “I know it’s a state law, but as far as I’m concerned, our state kind of screwed up.”

Policy 522 is an incredibly detailed 28-page document covering a wide swath of Title IX policies, definitions, procedures and other school district obligations to prevent, investigate or punish discrimination on the basis of sex. According to the policy, that includes discrimination “on the basis of sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity” in any education program or activity the district operates, including admission and employment.

In the end, however, Scarbrough voted with the rest of the board to approve the policy and 33 others in one fell swoop, because he didn’t want to create a situation where other board members would have to vote on something that really isn’t up to the district. Most of the policy changes stemmed from legislative actions.

Superintendent Cary weighed in on the long list of policy changes.

“My only comment … is I would really love it if the state would spend less time trying to write school district policy from the legislature,” he said. “You can see it creates a ton of work that really starts to take away control of your school districts.”