MARSHALL — As the 2018-19 school year kicked off on Tuesday, it seemed entirely appropriate that the Marshall Public School Board would take a look at student enrollment. And since enrollment at MPS has increased for the ninth straight year, it’s become a common conversation.

This year, however, the numbers are much higher than anyone ever anticipated.

“We asked all of our sites to submit their headcounts to us (Tuesday), just a basic count of how many students we had,” MPS Superintendent Scott Monson said. “(In this chart), I tried to illustrate for you, some of the things that we look at when we’re getting ready to figure out enrollment projections. A lot of times, we use grade project. We just roll the number of students we end last year with over to the next grade level. That gives us somewhat of an idea of where we’re at.”

Monson said the district finished the 2017-18 school year with 2,470 students.

“Using grade progression, we thought we’d have somewhere in the vicinity of 2,494 students,” he said. “That’s using an estimate, or any average, for kindergarten because we don’t know how many kindergarten numbers we’re going to have.”

Despite efforts to gauge enrollment ahead of time, the numbers aren’t realized until the students are actually in the classrooms — kindergarten classes begin on Monday for MPS students. Including an estimated number of kindergarten students, Monson said the first day of school enrollment was at 2,549.

“That’s 79 students more than we finished last year with and it’s obviously significantly higher than what we thought it would be based on grade progression and some of our other things,” Monson said. “We have a lot more students than we anticipated, but that’s a good thing. Obviously, we’ve had that conversation before.”

Monson said administrators have worked to make some adjustments, especially at the middle school in terms of class sections. They’ll continue to watch those over the next few weeks, he said.

“I typically don’t get real excited about enrollment until about the 1st of October, but when the number is that much higher than we thought it was going to be and that much higher than last year, it’s something to be excited about,” he said. “We’ll just continue to monitor it.”

Board member Bill Mulso asked if space issues would continue being problematic. Monson said there were space issues pretty much everywhere throughout the district.

“There are times where it would be nice to have another section, but the space just doesn’t exist,” Monson said. “That’s the challenge we have — though that’s also created some opportunities for us as well as far as programming-wise. I think our administrators and our staff do a good job of being creative and have been creative for a number of years with space. We’ll just have to take it a year at a time.”

Board member Karen VanKeulen asked if the increased enrollment had affected the targets for classroom sizes. Monson said he would check into that and get the information to the board by the end of the week.

“(Tuesday) was kind of a rush, with everything that was going on,” Monson said. “But I think in general, with the adjustments we made and the addition of a section, I think we’re going to be OK. Kindergarten is always one that we tend to be a little over on, but we have to remember that we have a full-time aide in each kindergarten classroom, so if that number ends up being a little higher than our target, it’s no the worst thing in the world because those aides do a lot of great work for kids. They’re almost like having another teacher in the classroom.”

Board member Bill Swope acknowledged that he felt the increase was a tremendous one.

“I think a 55-student increase beyond what we projected is pretty dramatic,” he said. “As closely as we look at it each year, being 55 students beyond what we thought we would get is huge. It’s great news.”

The board then briefly discussed the fact that the numbers were even well above the projections from state demographer Hazel Reinhardt.

“We have far outpaced her projections over the last few years,” Monson said.