Jacob Dimond / jake@yelmonline.com
During a Yelm Community Schools Board of Directors meeting on Thursday, Oct. 23, Superintendent Chris Woods discussed some of the enrollment challenges faced within YCS and across the state.
Woods first highlighted several enrollment trends within YCS and compared the data to where it sat during the 2014-15 school year. He noted that enrollment numbers included in his presentation were based on Oct. 1 headcounts of students each year.
“With enrollment, I want to talk about Yelm specifically and what we’re seeing. I’m going to go through Yelm, and then I’m going to talk about the state, and then I’m going to talk about some of the reasons why,” Woods said. “Going all the way back to 2014-2015, you can see the dip around 2020 and a dip starting in the 2023-24 time period — which again, I’m going to talk more about that when we move forward.”
Woods added that a September count is often not helpful with providing official enrollment numbers because there are a lot of students who aren’t counted if they’re not present for the first four days of school.
Additionally, Woods compared enrollment data trends with districts “similar in size” like Tumwater, Kelso, North Kitsap and Shelton. He said these districts are experiencing similar trends and noted all five took a dip in enrollment during the 2020-21 school year.
First, Woods highlighted enrollment numbers from specific groups of students within YCS. He first discussed English language learners and noted in 2014-15, there were 101 students within the district considered to be learning the language. After the Oct. 1 count for the 2025-26 school year, Woods claimed there are 243 students considered to be learning the language within the district.
He then identified trends from low income students and said during the 2014-15 school year that 51.1% of all YCS students were considered low income. Following the Oct. 1, 2025, count, Woods said 49.6% of YCS students are considered low income. He noted this trend is “very close to the same” across the state of Washington.
Additionally, Woods compared data about students within YCS with disabilities and said in the 2014-15 school year there were 798 students considered to have disabilities. In the 2025-26 school year, the count sits at 1,086, according to Woods.
“We’ve talked a lot about those numbers growing and continuing to grow, particularly here in Yelm,” Woods said. “I think part of that is families coming here because of the services we provide and a great reputation for working with these students. I think we’re going to continue to see that number grow across the state and across the country.”
Woods then compared statewide enrollment numbers of kindergarteners to the number of students graduating in Washington — and noted there is a difference of roughly 16,000 students.
This past school year, there were 87,000 seniors to only 71,000 kindergarteners across Washington state, according to Woods. The current class of kindergarteners would also be students born in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“What that means is we are graduating larger groups of students than we are bringing into kindergarten,” he said. “As we look at some more of the data, that’s a trend that is going to continue across the state. You can see where that started to separate after the pandemic. Really, in the pandemic, we saw a significant decrease in kindergarten students because kindergarten is not a state requirement.”
Woods added another reason is that families elected to home school their students during the COVID-19 pandemic, adding that some realized “home schooling worked well for them.” According to information from OSPI, Woods said the gap between kindergarteners and seniors will remain through the 2025-2035 window, but noted everything else beyond that is a prediction.
OSPI does project those gaps balancing out after 2024 and beyond.
“But the other thing I would caution is that when you’re making predictions based on predictions, those are very soft numbers,” Woods said. “So really, what we can really look at here is the data from the past, but we’re also looking up til’ 2030. We’re going to continue to see far fewer kindergarteners coming into school than we have seniors leaving school.”
Additionally, Woods cited low birth rates as another reason for districts like YCS experiencing a decline in younger students.
“You look at the birth rates over time, we’re seeing a steady decline, which is also going to translate into fewer students,” Woods said. “Schools, districts across the state are having to adjust to this — in every district, even districts that are projecting increases. They’re very slight, not much at all.”
Leading up to the 2025-26 school year in YCS, Woods constantly reiterated that the district would have to monitor potential incoming transfer students very closely for a number of reasons. One of the biggest reasons, Woods said, is because one year ago, in the spring, YCS cut 100 positions across the district.
“What that meant was we had fewer classrooms for our students to be in. We had to decline transfers,” Woods said. “People say, ‘why wouldn’t you take the transfers because it means more money?’ Well, if they come in nice and neat buckets, as far as grade level, where you can add a teacher and solve that problem of overload — that’s great. But typically they come across a variety of grade levels, and so having one teacher doesn’t solve that overload problem.
“We decided we’re not going to overload our classrooms with those students from out of our district. It’s not fair to our families who live here, and it’s not fair to our staff,” Woods said. “We also know we’ve seen a decline because of our failing levy. Once you fail a levy and there starts to be conversations around the failing levy, people will go to other districts because they know there are going to be fewer opportunities for their children in the district.”
Woods added, when former YHS head football coach Jason Ronquillo resigned from his teaching and coaching positions last school year, it led to players leaving the program and transferring out of the district.
“They went to other programs as well. In addition to that, we’ve already touched on the significant decrease in kindergarten because of those birth rates. We’ll continue to see a decrease there,” Woods said. “In an effort to continue to be transparent about our situation, the things we’re facing, enrollment will continue to be one of those things that becomes a challenge and is going to require a reduction of staffing year after year as that goes down.”
