First-day numbers generally stable for local districts
The schools in the area just started up again. Even though the first-day numbers didn’t give a perfect picture of the final amount of students for the school year, they did give clues about what the year would be like.
Aurora
The number of students in the Aurora School District has grown a lot since last year, when the number of students was already healthy. They had 1,741 kids at the start of the 2023 school year. After only one year, Aurora now has 1,871 students, 130 more than it did the year before.
Miller
The number of students in the Miller school district in northern Lawrence County also went up, which was good news. The number of students in the Cardinal group rose from 560 in 2023 to 578 this year. The addition of 18 students is good news for the R-2 district, which is busy building on to the campus to make room for even more students.
Monett
It was one of the lowest starts to the school year in Monett in the last 15 years. There were 2,206 students, not adding the 125 in pre-kindergarten Early Childhood on the first day. Before the COVID pandemic, the number of students was higher from 2011 to 2019. In 2020, with the 332 students who attended online, the total number of students was 2,232.
Numbers in kindergarten, which show how much students will grow over the next 12 years, stayed about the same at 156. This year’s first graders, who moved up from last year’s class, had 169. The number of students at Monett Elementary stayed the same at 676, showing that not much changed. With only 140 students in the fifth grade, the numbers at the middle school drop. There were 174 students in the seventh grade, one less than in the eighth grade. This made the middle school a little bigger.
The high school will have a good number of students—713, which is a lot less than the 800-person capacity goal that the district was afraid would be too many before the new middle school was built.
Mt. Vernon
One of only a few nearby school districts that saw a small drop in the number of students from one year to the next was the Mt. Vernon R-5 School District. Last year at this time, their schools had a total of 1,454 students registered. Early numbers for 2024 show a little less than that, with 1,448 students. This amount will change over the course of the year.
Pierce City
At Pierce City School District, the number of students stayed high at 688, which is close to the 693 that were enrolled in 2019. With 48 kids, kindergarten had almost the smallest class size on the first day. Second and third grade, on the other hand, were both a little smaller. There were 299 kids at Central Elementary, and 38 were in pre-kindergarten.
With 64 seventh graders, Pierce City’s middle school has the biggest class of the year. There are 49 eighth graders and 52 sixth graders on either side of that building. That’s 224 people at the high school. The juniors have 60, which is one more than the freshmen, making them the second biggest class of the year. The 55 people in this year’s graduate class began the year.
It was Superintendent Matt Street’s first year running the district. He said, “Our first day of school went incredibly well and set a positive tone for the rest of the year.” It was great to see how much energy the kids and staff had. Things got going quickly for everyone. It was a great start to what will be a great year of learning, growth, and success.
Purdy
A few more people showed up at Purdy; 599 people showed up on the first day. Before the pandemic, Purdy’s count went up and down by 40 to 80 kids each year, reaching a high point of more than 700 in 2004. Most of the recent rise came from 55 new kindergarteners, which is the biggest group of new students in a few years.
There were 326 kids in the primary school, which went from kindergarten to sixth grade. The smallest group in the area is made up of 36 first graders. The next smallest are 42 fourth graders and 43 sixth graders. With 59 students, the fifth graders had the largest class in the whole district.
The year began with 31 kids in pre-kindergarten. For grades 7th through 12, the high school ranged from a low of 41 for seniors to a high of 51 for seventh graders. That made 273 high schools.
Trinity Lutheran
There were a lot more students at Freistatt’s Trinity Lutheran School than at the beginning of 2023. The small district added 20 students, bringing the total number of students up to 145. This is more than 15% more than last year’s count. This is a good sign for the future of the well-known private school business.
Verona
Verona had 287 students on the first day of the school year, which is a little more than 100 fewer than it had 10 years ago. The number of students has been pretty stable over the past few years. Early in the 2019-2020 school year, there were 359 students.
With 11 kids in pre-kindergarten, Verona expected to have a slightly bigger class of 14 kids in kindergarten. Between K and 6, the smallest class was made up of 13 fourth graders. There were 23 kids in the sixth grade, which was the biggest level.
There were 27 students in each of the sophomore and senior classes, which were the biggest in the district. Freshmen had 25 and juniors had 25. This meant that the rate of graduation would be very even for the next few years. That made 144 in the high school, down from 203 at the beginning of the 2020-21 school year.