Officials: schools off to good start

With the first week of the school year securely in the books, school officials said that everything seemed to go as well as could be expected.
Russellville City Schools Superintendent Rex Mayfield said their system saw a slight increase in enrollment this past week.
He said enrollment numbers at the end of the 2011-2012 school year were at 2,483 students and enrollment numbers after this first week of school represented 2,500 students.
“Our enrollment fluctuates from year to year but it normally stays somewhere around this number,” Mayfield said.
Last year, the system saw the largest kindergarten class they ever had with 240 kindergarteners registering for school, and even though this year’s class of 210 didn’t quite meet the mark from last year, Mayfield said it was still a large class in comparison to other grades.
“With the 210 kindergarteners we have and the 240 enrolled in first-grade, we have a large number of elementary students, which has been the trend the past few years,” Mayfield said.
While city school experienced a slight increase in enrollment, Franklin County Schools Superintendent Gary Williams said the system saw a decrease in enrollment this past week by about 75 students.
“System-wide we have 3,104 students enrolled this year so far,” Williams said. “That number usually increases a little after the first week, but overall, we’ll still have a decrease in students.”
Williams said the decrease could be attributed to a couple of different factors.
“The economy is one reason I believe enrollment is down,” Williams said. “With so many people having to leave the area to find work, they sometimes have to move far enough away that they have to take their families with them and enroll them in a different school.”
He said the continued rebuilding from 2011’s tornado outbreak had some bearing on the enrollment as well, especially in Phil Campbell and East Franklin.
“We still have people in the area who are displaced from the storms or have moved on to other areas, so those kids aren’t going to school here,” he said. “But we still have a lot of houses being rebuilt and people coming back to those areas, so we think we’ll get some of that number back eventually.”
Besides enrollment, Mayfield said they only had a few minor details to work out this past week.
With the Russellville City Schools, traffic is always a problem the first few days of the new year with all four schools located in close proximity to one another, but Mayfield said it appeared the traffic issues weren’t as bad as they have been in years past.
“We appreciate the city police for helping direct traffic the first couple of days until everyone got back in the swing of things,” Mayfield said. “Usually after that first week the traffic problems seem to work themselves out and it’s not as much of an issue anymore.”
He said they also made a few adjustments to some of the bus routes to make them more efficient.
“Last year a few of the bus routes were really loaded down with students,” Mayfield said. “We made a few changes and got that worked out after the first day and we think the changes will be better for the students and the bus drivers.
“Even with the few adjustment and kinks we had to work out, all in all, I think we had a great start to the year.”
Williams agreed that he felt like the start of this school year for Franklin County was one of the best they’ve had in recent years, something he attributed in large part to the results of the Annual Yearly Progress report stating that all the county schools and the system as a whole had met their goals for 2011-2012.
“We didn’t meet all of our goals the year before last, so going into this school year knowing we had done everything we needed to do last year was a good feeling, especially for our teachers,” Williams said. “At our in-service meetings, everyone was really positive and ready to start the new year and have the same success as we did last year.”