Schools face space crunch The Green Bay board hears about trends for the next five years By Michelle Kennedy News-Chronicle Enrollments in Green Bay area schools have grown more than originally forecast, and administrators say the trend likely will continue. Births in Brown County have increased every year since 1995, so kindergarten enrollments are expected to increase significantly in the next five years. Combined with programs like SAGE and full-day kindergarten, area schools grow increasingly tight with each passing school year. Jim Lemke, director of facilities and planning for the Green Bay School District, said more families are moving to Green Bay because of its strong economy. Organized activities, both school and non-school related, are often cited as favorable reasons for people to move to the area, he said. One thing the district could do to help relieve crowding in certain schools is change school boundaries, he said. While no boundary changes are proposed for the 2002-03 school year, the board is looking to Green Bay's Smart Growth Comprehensive Plan, now in the planning process, the document that outlines the city's growth plan for the next twenty years, to help dictate the boundary review process. "What we would like to do is include boundary planning as a subset of the strategic plan and from that our boundary planning can flow, with the understanding that any changes that are made will be permanent," Lemke said. Several areas that require monitoring are: * Preble High School will exceed the board's high school enrollment guidelines of 2,000 students. The school can operate through the next year, but boundary changes are recommended for consideration. * Edison Middle School enrollment is rising again, even with the addition of Red Smith School. The school's limit is 1,200 and boundary changes are also recommended for consideration here. * Martin Luther King Elementary School enrollment has declined, but with new housing being built the area has been recommended for monitoring. * McAuliffe Elementary School enrollment is over 500 students this year after three years of steady decline. Housing growth is strong in this area. * Baird and Danz elementary schools enrollments rose more than expected this year. Overall, student enrollments in all Green Bay schools grew slightly since the 1994-95 school year. In 1994-95 total school enrollments were 19,468. This number has grown to 20,245 in the 2001-02 school year. However, while elementary school enrollments have declined from a high of 9,984 in 1995-96 to 9,501 in 2001-02, enrollments in middle and high school have increased. Middle schools saw an increase from 4,195 students in 1994-95 to 4,560 in 2001-02. High schools have increased by a higher margin from 5,500 in 1994-95 to 6,184 in 2001-02. School superintendent Dan Nerad noted that with the addition of full day kindergarten and SAGE schools, which require that designated low-income schools have less than 20 children per class in the kindergarten through third grades, that some schools have gone from having available space three or four years ago to having every room being full. "My view is that we need to go year by year and when we make a boundary change it is with the understanding that there is permanence to it," Nerad said. "We have to be cautious not to look at boundary changes or facility projects just because a student population goes over population guidelines recommended by a previous board."