After being battered for the last several years by free-falling enrollment, the Willow Run school district received a glimmer of hope that a turn-around may be in the cards during the “spring count” of its students.

According to Acting Superintendent Laura Lisiscki, the district grew during the course of the school year.

"It is important for us to celebrate all of our successes. The small ones are just as
important as the big ones, so with that being said, we are proud to announce that Willow Run is up 27 students from the fall count.”

Willow Run had good news in its spring count day this year.

File photo

Districts across the state counted students last week as one of two official count days in the school year. Local districts counted students on Thursday, one day after snow closed the schools on the official count day.

The districts have several days following the count to amend those numbers, but eight of the 10 county traditional districts shared numbers with AnnArbor.com this week.

The count is used by the state as part of a formula to determine how many students attend a district. That’s a big deal because the state pays each district a set amount per student.

Last week’s count day will be 25 percent of the total for next school year’s funding number. The remaining 75 percent will be made up of the count from fall 2010 count.

For Willow Run, that would mean an additional $7,840 in state aid for each student added to the count, under the current state funding levels.

Traditionally, most school districts see a drop between the fall count of a school year and the spring count of the same year.

However, several districts, including Ann Arbor, didn’t see that drop this year.

“Typically you always lose students in the spring,” said Superintendent Todd Roberts. “Some kids graduate in January and some people move in the middle of the school year. This year, we didn’t have that drop.”

Local school officials didn’t have any explanation for the numbers not dropping, but several speculated that the poor economy and housing market meant less people moving to new jobs or being able to sell their houses.

Not all districts stayed flat. Manchester dropped, but that comes with a bit of a caveat, Superintendent Shawn Lewis-Lakin said.

“Since we have students who migrate included in the fall count (these student are typically in our district from May through the end of October of each school year), simple October to February comparisons are not valid. Rather, we look at our October non-migrant to February non-migrant numbers. That comparison shows that we had a net gain of five non-migrant students from fall to winter count.”

David Jesse covers K-12 education for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at davidjesse@annarbor.com or at 734-623-2534.