School District 73 is out with a preliminary enrollment report showing that 94% of students are returning to physical schools.

There are 13,818 students that have returned to in-classroom learning across the district which is down 827 from last year.

Board Chair Rhonda Kershaw says she wasn’t surprised to see numbers be down. “I think there’s a lot of anxiety and some people are just waiting to see how it goes for a little bit before they actually take that plunge and go back. I think that once we get to September 30th our enrollment will probably be very close to what we anticipated for the year start.”

Kershaw says enrollment does impact the budget which does always bring a little bit of worry. “Enrollment is likely to fluctuate. We are very much bums-in-seats enrollment based for our funding. But there is, if we found ourselves quite down, there is a function called funding protection where they would bump up our budget if required.”

The report shows that 623 students have enrolled in Distance Learning. Last year only 186 were enrolled in Distance Learning.