My disappointment with the school board for some time has been that the steady yearly declines in enrollment have not translated into reduced property taxes.
In the past few days, school district “report cards” were released for the 2010-2011 school year. This is the last publicly available information on enrollment. So the most up to date information is for the LAST school year.
Numbers for the current school year (2011-2012) and projections for next year (2012-2013) are not available. However as you can see, enrollment has been falling in the Whitehall School District (and is projected to continue to fall) while property taxes have increased over the same period. So here is a table (compiled from public sources) for the last seven years of available data.
| 04-05 | 05-06 | 06-07 | 07-08 | 08-09 | 09-10 | 10-11 | % Change | |
| # Students | 885 | 860 | 858 | 845 | 815 | 779 | 753 | -14.91% |
As you can see, there has been an overall drop in total enrollment of almost 15% during the last seven years. Enrollment has declined every year during that time.
The three biggest individual yearly losses of students: 30, 36, and 26, have all happened over the last three years. In other words, the decline in yearly enrollment is accelerating.
When the school board claims they have cut spending, they have.
Except that it all comes from the state aid side as the state of New York has cut its aid to school districts.
The falling enrollment has not amounted to any cuts in property taxes. Losing 132 students over a seven year period (92 in the last three) resulted in no property tax savings for the local property taxpayers.
So there are the enrollment numbers for you to see.