By Matt Mackinder
Clarkston News Editor

INDEPENDENCE TWP. — At the Dec. 11 Clarkston Community Schools Board of Education meeting, the vast majority of the 45-minute meeting focused on enrollment numbers across the district.
John Lucido, CCS assistant superintendent of administrative services, gave the presentation before the board.
The numbers and statistics were compiled after the recent fall count day across Clarkston schools and compared to the fall count 2022 numbers.
“This is the first phase of our multi-part budgeting process here at Clarkston Community Schools and really looking at getting a ground base of how many pupils we have coming in the door really sets the stage for everything else,” said CCS Superintendent Dr. Shawn Ryan.
When comparing four items – CCS loss (Clarkston students that show up to buildings every day, down 84.57 students), Clarkston Virtual (up 27.82 students), Renaissance Virtual (down 959.68 students due to program being discontinued), and shared time students (Clarkston students that attend private schools with support of CCS for the fraction of time they attend, up 437.86 students) – the district is down 578.40 full-time students. A total of 6,436.27 students attend CCS schools in-person daily with 8,651.34 full-time equivalent (FTE) students put together with all the various programs. In 2022, the in-person numbers were 6,520.84 in person and 9,229.74 combined, all according to a chart Lucido presented at the meeting.
Overall, CCS buildings had a total loss of students of 84.57 when comparing fall 2022-23 student count.
Over this same time period, Clarkston Virtual gained 27.82 students.
The virtual program lost 959.51 students through its Renaissance Virtual program and gained 437.86 through shared service. Shared service allows for 10% growth each year based on the district’s fall count. A change in the interpretation of the growth calculation resulted in an increase in funding of roughly $2.7 million for the 2022-23 school year.
The financial impact of enrollment changes for 2023-24 will be a decrease in funding of roughly $2.3 million.
Steve Hyer, board trustee, noted that due to CCS having large kindergarten classes that it would seem that enrollment numbers will pick up over the next several years.
“Is that accurate?” asked Hyer.
“Yes, it is,” Lucido responded. “I have our birth rate studies as well and it looks like we’re leveling off and I have Plante Moran data (from 2022) in direct comparison with our birth rates. I agree with you. I think we’re going to plateau with student loss here.”
Board Secretary Cheryl McGinnis asked if there is data that shows students living in the district not utilizing CCS, through birth rate and residency.
“I thought in years past that the county has a means from the birth rate or from the birth rate of our local hospitals to give us a birth rate increase or decrease,” McGinnis said. “All I’m saying is that if we are under capacity in both our three- and four-year (preschool) programs, that data might be available by Oakland County, and could we do something with it? Can we reach out to those parents and let them know that services are available for them?”
“The births of 2021 would probably be in that area,” said Lucido. “I don’t have data on who those individuals are to market, but we’d have to look into that.”
As far as recommendations moving forward, Lucido said the district has to continue to monitor enrollment trends for approaching staffing and budget cycles, continue general and special programing open enrollment, and continue to look for opportunities to grow the virtual and shared service programming.
“Are you concerned about the lack of physical students in the buildings?” asked Amanda Love, board trustee. “I know financially, we’re covering it, but at what point do we start losing sports teams or those types of impacts?”
“It gets harder to staff our special programs and all the different electives, the languages, the CSMTech, the IB programs, as the numbers continually go down when you don’t have enough students,” said Lucido. “That’s why the open enrollment might be something that we want to consider expanding at many grade levels potentially, to kind of build that up.
“You don’t want to end up with an Andersonville (Elementary) or a North Sashabaw (Elementary) where they have one third grade class. I don’t think it’s an immediate concern at the moment, but we don’t want to see our numbers go down. It’s nice to see that the projections when you look at the birth rates and Plante Moran show us plateauing, and they have said we are plateauing for a number of years now and it hasn’t really come to fruition. I’m hoping that this new data is trending and these new neighborhoods coming up will bring in more students.”
Love also asked if four-year-old preschool is free across the state for the 2024-25 school year. Lucido said he didn’t know if that had been approved yet, and Ryan said it’s still under consideration. Love asked if it’s approved can the district get students then during the open enrollment period.
“Absolutely,” said Lucido.
“That would be one route I would recommend, we get them through Early Childhood and keep them through 12th grade, if we can,” added Ryan. “We’ll have more to come on that in the spring and we have some ideas to shift things around. It’s been nice to level out and increase our kindergarten, but from time to time, we have to add staff with it to keep class sizes low.
“If we were to spread it out more in the K-5 realm, we’d probably have a scenario where we could absorb and keep the class sizes where they are.”

PHOTO: CCS Administration Building. File photo: Matt Mackinder