Gwinnett County Public Schools expect more than 180,000 students when the doors open next week as the state’s largest school system continues to grow. The system added almost 2,000 students in the past year, according to spokesperson Sloan Roach, and has budgeted for an additional 154 teachers. However, it will not open any new schools this fall.
Those students outnumber the population of all but Georgia’s largest 12 counties, and it is more than the combined population of the state’s smallest 28 counties.
Roach said the system expects 180,186 students, but that count won’t be final for at least a couple of months. The school conducts student counts throughout the first few weeks of the year until just after Labor Day. Roach said that some students simply don’t show up for the first week or so of classes.
The most important student count comes in October. That’s the one that is used for the student population for state and federal funding. After that, she said the student population is expected to grow slowly until just before the Christmas break. After the break, the population generally goes down slightly until the end of the school year.
As for teachers, the system has money for 10,682, up for 10,528 a year ago. Actual teacher numbers also fluctuate through the year. More than 1,100 of those teachers will be new to the Gwinnett system. That number includes both teachers in new slots and teacher hired because of turnover.
Roach said the system’s planning office is usually pretty close to spot-on with its enrollment projections. As for exactly where those students will be, that often is a little trickier. Teachers may be moved from one school to another once the system is confident exactly where those teachers are needed.
With the system already expecting to pass 180,000 students and adding a few thousand students per year, the next big milestone – 200,000 students – would appear likely in less than a decade. Roach said that number is important, if only because it is the next number with a bunch of zeroes on the end.
“We think we have done a good job of planning,” she said. Gwinnett, she said, has done that by building large, expandable schools. It simply would not have been practical for the system to build a bunch of smaller, neighborhood schools.
As for peak enrollment, that isn’t on the horizon at all.
