(Griswold) The Griswold School District and School Board continues to look for ways to change the open enrollment trend.
Griswold Superintendent Dave Henrichs said currently they have 20 students that open enroll in and 60 students open enroll out. The Griswold School Board held a work session on Thursday, January 9th for the purpose of reviewing open enrollment data. Henrichs said the Board reviewed feedback of some meetings he held with students which consisted of the 9-12 Grade National Honor Society, Student Council and Fall sports participants, and meetings with the staff and the School Improvement Advisory Committee. He said they were asked what they would consider reasons that the Griswold School District would be a school choice today and then what are some reasons that maybe Griswold would not be a school choice today.
Henrichs said the Board made a couple of general statements.
“Some of the open enrollment will continue to happen no matter what the district does due to things such as convenience, whether it’s work or daycare and those kinds of things. Also looking at the data, there were really no concerns about academics so that was definitely a positive,” said Henrichs.
Henrichs said there were some ‘big picture’ things they pulled out from the data.
“We need to keep focusing on student and staff morale to make sure everyone feels like they are a valued member of our team; activities seem to be both a positive and a negative in terms of the open enrollment aspect; the third thing was we need to make sure that we keep our facilities up so we’re attracting people due to those things,” explained Henrichs.
Henrichs said some of the things they’re looking into in the future is possibly trying to get some parents to start a Parent Teacher Organization to provide an avenue for people to discuss issues more openly with the Board and Administration as well as help them develop some solutions to those things. A Board Member and an Administrator are going to contact some other school districts that they believe have a strong PTO and see how they run theirs to see if they can utilize some of their ideas.
Henrichs said another focus is on their youth sports program.
“Which is not necessarily school affiliated, but make sure that as we’re teaching and coaching up through the ages that it correlates from youth sports to high school so those skills that are needed are taught the way that the high school coach wants those to happen, so we’re trying to do some reorganization with that group,” stated Henrichs.
Henrichs said over the last 10-years, open enrollment in has ranged from 15 to 26 students, the outs have increased each of the last ten years with the exception of 2014-15 to 2015-16 which went down from 54 to 49 and from 2017-18 to 2018-19 which went down from 58 to 56. So, over a ten year period open enrollment out has increased 22 students.
