Utah schools are growing faster than the state thought.
This fall, classrooms across the state added 2,501 new desks. That's more than double the 1,113 expected by the State Office of Education.
In a state with 477,770 schoolchildren, taking in 1,400 unforeseen students seems minute.
But the tally is significant in two ways: Nearly 2,300 of the 2,501 new students attend school in Utah County's already bulging Alpine and Nebo districts.
The numbers also might show the state's predicted 100,000 new-student surge between now and 2010 actually is conservative.
"I think this kind of validates our expectations of the number of children who will be entering the school system in the next several years," Patty Murphy, school-statistics specialist for the State Office of Education, told the Deseret News Thursday. The fall 2001 enrollment figures are considered preliminary but solid.
"If anything, this will make future projections even higher."
Karl Bowman is not surprised that enrollment tallies ballooned past projections. And the Alpine Elementary School principal sighs in relief that boundaries for his school were recently changed to reduce the school's rolls.
"It's amazing to me that there are that many people who are moving to Utah — and Utah County in particular," he said.
A construction craze in north Utah County has created a space crunch at some Alpine schools. At both Snow Springs and Cedar Ridge elementary schools, some 1,200 students are shoe-horned into schools built for about 860.
"We knew it was coming," said JoDee Sundberg, president of Alpine's Board of Education. "That's why we prepared for it."
A $200 million voter-approved bond issuance will pay for eight new schools, including another elementary school in Alpine or Highland, neighboring cities in north Utah County.
"We'll be able to keep up with the growth," she said. "I think we'll be OK. It has to reach a point where it will stabilize."
About half of Utah's 40 school districts experienced growth. Alpine, Utah's fourth-largest district at 48,300 students, gained the most with 1,179 students, a 2.5 percent change. State officials predicted a 1.5 percent growth.
Nebo District is serving 1,004 new children, 4.8 percent more than last year. The state had predicted 1.8 percent growth in the south Utah County district, which now enrolls 22,070.
Nebo also anticipated the influx. Voters last year approved a $45 million bond and leeway to pay for the construction and operation of five new elementary schools and renovations at existing schools than needed to be upgraded and expanded.
Washington School District added 589 students, bringing its total enrollment to just under 19,000, a 3.2 percent increase from last year. The state had predicted 1.4 percent growth.
"This was larger than we had expected," said Kolene Granger, Washington superintendent.
The once-burgeoning district had been losing students since 1998, allowing it to take some schools off year-round schedules and create more elbow room with intermediate schools for sixth- and seventh-graders.
But the unexpected growth forces the district to build more quickly than planned. The district needs a new intermediate school in Pineview, two or three elementaries and — later on — a new high school and perhaps another intermediate school in Hurricane, Granger said. District officials will seek a bond to cover some of those needs. The amount is undetermined.
Tooele School District got a little break this year. It grew by 3.6 percent to 9,500, quite a bit less than the 5.4 percent growth the state expected. Still, there's no end in sight for its off-the-charts growth spurt.
On the other end is Piute. It lost 10 percent of its students, who now total 318. The state had projected 1.7 percent growth.
The Beehive State is the nation's most fertile, according to the 2000 Census. Most of the new students weren't born here, however. About 1,500 new students moved to Utah from out of state, Murphy said. That's the highest in-migration seen since 1996, when 1,486 students moved in.
Murphy chalks up the migration to "the Olympic affect," or part of the changing landscape as Salt Lake City prepares to host the 2002 Winter Games. She expects the number to drop next year.
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