The official enrollment count for the Duneland Schools that will be used to determine state funding shows a gain of 165 students over last year.

Duneland Superintendent Dirk Baer reported on the official count – known as the “Average Daily Membership”– at a special school board meeting Thursday.

The ADM count, taken on Friday of last week, shows Duneland’s total enrollment at 5,774, compared to the ADM of 5,609 last year.

The ADM is not the actual number of students, since the ADM counts each kindergarten student as one-half only, since that is how the state funds kindergarten. On the first day of school, the total number of students was 5,883. The comparable first-day figure last year was 5,764.

Thursday’s school board meeting was called to adopt the proposed 2008 school budget. The school board adopted the budgets as advertised and as earlier outlined at previous school board meetings. With all funds, the proposed budget for the Duneland Schools totals $62.8 million, a 5.2 percent increase over the advertised budget for 2007. The budget is subject to change and will be finalized later by the state.

Also at Thursday’s meeting, Chesterton High School Principal Jim Goetz gave a report on the school’s efforts at participating in the International Baccalauerate program, in which qualifying students take rigorous course offerings that typically qualify them for college credit.

Officials with the IB program have conducted their initial visit to CHS, and the school should know sometime in the spring if it is accepted into the program. “As far as we know it went well,” Baer said of the visitation.

If CHS is accepted into the program, some of the IB offerings will begin in the fall of 2008, Baer said. The cost to the Duneland Schools to become an IB school is expected to be around $30,000 to $40,000 yearly, mainly for training of staff and course materials, he said.

Posted 9/21/2007