The Flin Flon School Division (FFSD) is at a 30-year low for student enrollment this year, with all four of the schools it runs seeing lower student numbers.
In total, about 872 students are attending school within the FFSD this year, according to enrollment data gathered by the division. The data was shared during the board’s Oct. 11 meeting, seeing the division go down from 946 students last year.
Flin Flon’s largest school, Ecole McIsaac School, saw the biggest drop in overall students, going from an enrollment of 369 last year to 320 this year. Many Faces Education Centre is also seeing a substantial decline in student numbers. A year ago, 94 students were taking courses at the school - only 74 are as of the end of September.
Two of the schools saw only modest declines. Ruth Betts Community School stayed almost constant, with 249 students compared to last year’s 252, while Hapnot Collegiate stayed almost the same, dropping by only one net student - going from 231 last year to 230 this year.
That data shows the number of students within the FFSD is at the lowest level it has been at since at least 1999, almost half of where enrollment was during that year. Student numbers for the division hovered around the 1,000 range for most of the 2010s before diving lower starting in 2019. FFSD student enrollment was at its recent peak in the late ‘90s - 1,645 students were in Flin Flon schools in 1999, the earliest year data was available for. Students from Creighton still attended high school in Flin Flon for most of those years.
The new information comes after a year where FFSD’s enrollment grew slightly, going from 905 students in Sept. 2020 to 930 last year.
“That’s significantly down, really,” said superintendent Tammy Ballantyne at the meeting.
Going by publicly available data for the 2021-22 school year, the number of students within FFSD would make the division the third-smallest by population in the province, only ahead of the Turtle River School Division based in McCreary (2021 student body: 673) and the School District of Whiteshell, centred around Pinawa - Whiteshell had 197 students total last year.
Lower enrollment can mean less funding from the provincial government and education ministry for school programs, staffing and services.
