Laconia course-corrects on kindergarten enrollment, will return to centralized registration

LACONIA — Kindergarteners in the city will attend the school nearest where they live in 2024 and be registered through the district office, returning practice to a longstanding policy.

Parents in the last few years have been able to register kindergarteners at the school of their choice on a largely first-come, first-served basis. After the district stepped in to correct lopsided enrollment numbers between its three elementary schools this summer, Superintendent Steve Tucker said Laconia will move to an online central registration system next year. Under this system, each residence in the city has been assigned to a school zone. Because they will register online rather than at each school, students will now go to the school in their zone, unless granted an exception by the district. Reimplementing a zone-based model is aimed at ensuring balanced class sizes and consistency in district practice from year to year.

“Everybody wants small class sizes: teachers want it, parents want it and kids want it,” Tucker said. “That is the goal.”

The district saw a bump in new kindergarteners for this upcoming school year, according to remarks made by Tucker at a school board meeting in July. But, with only 17 families left unregistered, class sizes at each of the district’s three elementary schools were unbalanced: 48 kindergarteners across three classes at Elm Street, 32 in two classes at Pleasant Street and just eight students at Woodland Heights.

Tucker worked with the remaining families, he said, and most are enrolled at the school nearest them, including additional students at Woodland Heights. Final registration numbers include 50 kindergarteners enrolled at Elm Street, 35 enrolled at Pleasant Street and 36 enrolled at Woodland Heights.

The imbalance revealed the practice happening in the district for the last few years was not in alignment with its enrollment policy and threatened to crowd some families out of their nearby schools.

“There were some people that were living close to schools, and if we had not intervened, they wouldn’t have been able to go to the school in their zone,” Tucker said in an interview. Furthermore, he continued, the ballooning class sizes possible under an open choice model would become — and in some ways already are — a strain on district resources.

While the district will reestablish a central registration system in alignment with current policy next year, the school board will continue to chew on the topic and evaluate that policy.

District enrollment policy states “All new resident students, accompanied by parent or guardian, shall register at the Superintendent’s Office for grades K-5.” The policy says it was approved in 2001, but, according to Tucker, the district first implemented a central registration model and established zones in 1998.

Sometime after 2015 — a series of leadership changes means the district is unsure exactly when — parents were invited to pick up registration packets on-site at elementary schools instead. This devolved, Tucker said, into an assumption that parents could enroll their children at a school of their choosing by picking up a registration packet there.

That assumption was not corrected, and more parents each year choose to register at a school other than the one closest to them. The increasingly skewed numbers, district administrators said, burden resources, threaten balanced class sizes and could prevent families from going to the school closest to them.

School buses retrieve students based on where they live, not where they are enrolled, and drop them at the neighborhood school. Shuttles then ferry students attending a school outside their zone. In the past, said Assistant Superintendent Amy Hinds, there had only been a handful of students who needed this service.

“What has happened now is those shuttle buses have sometimes over 30 children on them,” Hinds told the school board. “We are busing kids from schools to other schools completely out of the zones ... Those shuttle buses have become a real challenge for behavior and management.” 

When the school board discussed the issue at its meeting July 11, its members, with children of ranging ages, gave varied accounts of how registration occurred when they enrolled their kids. 

“We have three different experiences on what was expected or what was presented, as opposed to what should be,” said Nick Grenon, the board’s vice chair who represents Ward 5. “So I think there should be some clear definitions of what that is going forward.”

The new system will be a change, both because it will reimplement the central registration model and because it will ensure consistency and clarity in the process city-wide.

Under central registration, students are guaranteed a spot at the school in the zone where they live. A family can find their assigned zone by contacting the district or during the process of purchasing a home, but the zone lines are not currently published online. If families wish to send their children to another school, they can apply with the district for a waiver. 

There is no current district language outlining what qualifies for a waiver, but district leaders have listed family arrangements — such as having siblings in other schools or guardians residing elsewhere in the city — as likely accommodations.

The district is looking to clarify the boundaries of exceptions going forward, Tucker said. 

The board had an extended debate about central registration at the July meeting. They weighed whether and how extensively the zone lines, which have not changed since they were drawn in 1998, should be reevaluated and whether the zone model was equitable.

The current zone lines still produce the desired balance, according to the superintendent, and so there is no current need to reevaluate them. While, because it has an existing policy, there is no requirement for the board to take action on the matter, it will be a continuing point of dialogue. The board’s policy committee, according to Chair Heather Drolet (Ward 6), will review the district’s enrollment policy alongside recommendations from the New Hampshire School Boards Association and peer districts across the state.

There are three great elementary schools in Laconia, Tucker and board Chair Jennifer Anderson (at-large) have both emphasized. Which school parents prefer could be based on perceptions, rather than actual performance. 

“There’s a lot to say about perception,” Anderson told The Daily Sun. Even if parents believe one school to be better, the benefits they hope to get there could be shaved away by crowded classrooms. And, regardless of what neighborhoods people associate with each school, she continued, neither higher nor lower income areas are singularly looped into one zone. 

There are areas of high achievement happening in each of the elementary schools, Anderson said, but “it's maybe that it's not as visible to people.” 

Editor's note: This story has been updated to include final registration numbers for kindergarten students at all three of the city's elementary schools.