Mansfield School Enrollment Down, Class Sizes as Well

Superintendant of schools Brenda Hodges said that enrollment in Mansfield is down currently across the board.

While the implication of this is that costs for the schools could go down this year in the budget, but Hodges said that these enrollment numbers could easily fluctuate.

“This will change probably in the next couple of weeks,” she said.

Mansfield High School has 1,404 students enrolled, 1,131 students at the Qualters Middle-School,

Jordan Jackson Elementary has 1,065 students and Robinson Elementary has 839 students.

This year, as part of a statewide full-day initiative for kindergarten, the Mansfield school committee introduced a full-day kindergarten program that includes six classrooms.

The program started in late winter when Mansfield received a “start up grant” from the state that would allow the schools to set up the classrooms and purchase materials necessary to ready classes.

Class sizes have also lowered at most of the schools. Because of the possible popularity of certain class choices versus others, Hodges said that stundents tend to move in groups and it’s not easy to accommodate them and satisfy class sizes in certain classes.

“You just can’t schedule around what the students want,” she said.

She said that pre-algebra in Qualters currently has the most students in a classroom at a 29-30 range. She also noticed that class sizes can also fluctuate in the early weeks of the story.

MHS averaged 26-27 students, Qualters averaged 27-29, Jordan-Jackson came in at 25-27, 23 in grades 1 and 2 and 22 in Kindergarten.