Students crowd the hallway during a passing period in December at Franklin Community High School.
ANDY BELL-BALTACI | DAILY JOURNAL
From classes in trailers to new buildings being opened, Center Grove schools have seen the effects of population growth in its schools. Perhaps never in recent decades has that growth been more apparent than in the last five years.
When the school district submitted its student count to the Indiana Department of Education in September 2016, 8,083 students sat in classrooms and walked through hallways.
But now, those hallways are a lot more crowded. The school district saw 9,071 students pass through its doors when the school year began, an increase of almost 1,000 in a half-decade. Due to the growth, Center Grove schools opened Walnut Grove Elementary School in 2019, and over the next two years, construction crews will complete more than $30 million in work to add classrooms and expand cafeterias, music rooms, art rooms and science rooms.
The school district also plans to add classrooms to Center Grove High School in the coming years, according to school district documents.
Center Grove schools is working continuously to accommodate growth in the student body, said Paul Gabriel, chief financial officer.
“We see the need to continually add classes. That means more staff, and more kids generate more money from revenue from the state to get that all done,” Gabriel said.
“In addition to new buildings, we’ve added space and we have done some major renovations at almost every elementary school to the extent of adding classrooms. We’re doing Sugar Grove right now, we did Pleasant Grove and added to North Grove (elementary schools). We’ve done a lot of work like that to just add classrooms where we need them.”
As the second-largest school district in Johnson County, Clark-Pleasant schools is seeing a similar increase in student population. Between 2011 and 2021, the school district’s population increased by more than 10%, from 5,888 in the fall of 2011 to 6,720 in the fall of 2021.
In the coming months, the school board will vote on a $150 million project to upgrade Whiteland Community High School’s campus. The project would create a new administration building, relocate the cafeteria, create a natatorium for competitions and construct a new auditorium.
Increases in student population also caused the school district to open a larger middle school near Worthsville Road in 2011 and a new school, Ray Crowe Elementary School, in 2021. If growth continues at its current pace, the next decade could see another new elementary school and a second middle school, said Patrick Spray, superintendent.
“We have more students, we have to staff more buses, and you have, in addition to more buildings aging, you gotta adapt to what curriculum is expected to meet today’s job market,” Spray said. “It’s the investment of (science, technology, engineering and math) programs in the district, expanding programs from preschool through graduation. With our kind of growth, we’re a much more diverse school corporation. A lot of students are bilingual and English-learning programs create needs as far as capacity.”
The southern end of the county tells a different story, with student population growth either slow or nonexistent. At Edinburgh schools, enrollment has declined, down almost 10% since the 2015-16 school year. The decrease in students resulted in a decrease in state funding, and now the school district is looking at a property tax referendum in order to raise teacher salaries.
The loss in revenue amounts to $600,000 less in state dollars, the equivalent of 10 first-year teacher salaries and benefits, said Ron Ross, superintendent.
“The loss of students has been across all grade levels, which makes it hard to adjust programming. We still have the same needs, but less students to generate the money to fund those needs,” Ross said in an email. “This makes it very difficult to compete with larger and growing districts in terms of salaries, wages and academic programming.”
Indian Creek schools saw a slight decline in its student population from 2011 to 2016, but that population rebounded over the next five years to eclipse the 2016 figure by more than 10%. This past summer saw the most significant growth of any year in that time span, with 120 students added to bring the school district’s tally to 2,015.
The increase has allowed Indian Creek schools to raise teacher salaries, said Tim Edsell, superintendent.
“This year we were able to increase beginning salary from $36,500 to $42,000. The positive attribute of seeing an increase in enrollment is an increase in state revenue,” Edsell said. “In kindergarten through fifth grade, we’ve had to increase teachers and increase classroom space. We’re very close to capacity, but with strategic planning, we’ll figure out what needs to be done in the next three to five years to be able to manage the number of students we have.”
Greenwood schools, a landlocked district, experienced modest growth of about 5% from 2010 to 2021. Because the school district didn’t experience much change, it doesn’t have any massive expansion projects in the cards like other local school districts.
With the local population relatively steady, its growth is primarily driven by out-of-district transfer students, Superintendent Terry Terhune said in an email.
Franklin schools also hasn’t experienced as much growth as northern Johnson County school districts. Franklin schools’ student body has remained stagnant during the past five years, averaging about 5,000 to 5,200 students a year. But administrators anticipate student growth with the addition of more than 450 houses in the Bluffs at Youngs Creek development that is going in next to the Windstar subdivision, southwest of downtown Franklin. At least 1,100 homes are going to be built in Franklin in the next several years.
