Substantial increases in student enrollment for this school year came somewhat as a surprise to Lawrence school district officials — with the actual number of new students almost double the maximum number of new students projected — making for larger classes at all grade levels.

“We projected some increase, but not this much,” said Lawrence schools Superintendent Rick Doll.

Enrollment projection reports for the district, which are done by a professional education planning firm, predicted anywhere from 30 to 130 additional students districtwide, but instead enrollment increased by 249 students, according to district enrollment reports released Monday.

Most of the additional students are at the high school level, which accounted for 211 of the 249 students. Each high school enrolled more than 100 additional students. Those increases have made for larger classes, despite the addition of a few teaching positions at the high school level, Doll said.

“We anticipated some growth (at the high school level), so we allocated some teaching positions, but not enough to account for 211 more kids,” Doll said, in reference to four high school teaching positions that were added for this school year.

But other position reductions for this school year reduced high school positions. Contingency teachers for the middle and high schools — those not assigned to a classroom until closer to the beginning of the school year — were reduced from five teachers to three. The staff reductions were part of about 14 teaching positions not filled districtwide. The reductions were proposed in May as part of budget reductions made in response to changes to the state’s funding formula, district officials said at the time.

In March, the Kansas Legislature repealed the per-pupil school finance system that had been in place since 1992 and replaced it with block grants for the next two years, during which time legislators will put together a new funding formula.

“It strains our budget because under the block grant it doesn’t matter how many kids you have, you’re still capped at last year’s budget,” Doll said.

While enrollment increases at the elementary level were modest at 39 more students overall, the increase in combination with a reduction of positions means elementary class sizes are also larger this year. As part of the same budget reduction, 11 elementary teaching positions — including two contingency slots –were not filled. The eight elementary contingency teachers remaining were assigned to classrooms, Doll said.

“We’ve assigned all of our contingency reserve teachers to elementary classrooms,” he said. “And we budgeted for those contingency teachers, but any additional teachers now would have to come from reserves.”

Middle school enrollment is the only level that saw a decrease in numbers: a drop of just one student. As part of the budget reduction, middle school staffing levels were reduced by about five positions.

And with the block grant set to continue next school year, the district will likely be faced with the same problem. That will likely mean cuts somewhere else in order to hire more teachers, Doll said.

“There are no easy solutions to that,” he said. “To come up with more money we have to make cuts somewhere else, but we have not started talking about that.”