A total of 14,647.8 students are enrolled in School District 73 this year.

The SD73 Board was presented with its preliminary enrollment numbers at this weeks meeting. 237.1 more students are attending school in the Kamloops District this year compared to last year. That figure included 86 more kindergarten students.

Chair Kathleen Karpuk says it hired more kindergarten teachers this year and it will anticipate they will all graduate and it will have to make adjustments as that happens. “We then take that number of kindergarten students and we expect that they will all roll into grade one and then grade two and so it just means continual capacity issues in our schools because we have more students.”

Karpuk says numbers are flat in grade 1 through grade 7 and then it’s up 137 secondary students and its unsure as to why that’s the case. “And they’re scattered all over. We saw increases at Valleyview. We saw increases at Brock middle school. We saw increases at Sa-Hali Secondary. So they’re all over the city.”

Officials had predicted that there would be 175 more students this year, so 55 more students have enrolled in 2019-2020 than anticipated. Karpuk felt that was pretty accurate. “Considering it’s less than 1% of a margin of error for our predictions, it’s pretty darn good. When you look at our elementary numbers we were bang on in predicting how many our increase was going to be. So, out only blip was we did have more secondary students than we predicted, but it’s not something that’s unmanageable.”