By Staff Writer Shreya Narayan

For the second year in a row, next year’s freshmen class at Naperville North High School will be smaller than the current freshmen class according to assistant principal Ron Helms.

Helms said that student enrollment for the 2014-2015 school year will be smaller than the 2013-2014 enrollment by an estimated 80-100 students.

According to superintendent for secondary education Bob Ross, this decrease will require NNHS to make changes in its staff structure. Several staff members may have to be let go.

Staff members who non-tenuered and part-time, will be the first to go, followed by contractually full-time teachers who are nontenured. Ross explained that teachers are considered part-time when they teach fewer than five classes a day and do not have a supervision period. Course enrollment numbers also factor into the equation of where reductions in staff will be made.

“If things are even, then teacher ratings come into effect,” Helms said.

According to Helms, the school budget is based on the number of students enrolled. Because there are fewer students, funding goes down in three main categories: capital outlay, repair accounts, and instructional costs.

“It’s my job to distribute this money. The thought is that you don’t need as much paper, for example, if you don’t have as many kids and staff,” Helms said.

Helms said one of the main reasons for the drop in enrollment is students transferring to private schools.

According to the assistant principal of Benet Academy, James Brown, the 2014-2015 class will be the biggest freshmen class they’ve had, with a total of 350—an increase of seven students. Brown said that this growth is in part due to the school attracting more students from public middle schools.

In the 2012-2103 school year at Benet, 18 students that previously attended public junior high schools enrolled as freshmen at the private school. In this current school year, Benet added two to that total, with 20 freshmen coming from public junior highs.

Helms said that there are other factors that contribute to enrollment decrease, such as students who are still in the district, but attend off-campus locations like Ombudsman and other facilities like it. “The North Star” requested the exact number of students enrolled in such facilities, but Helms and Ross declined to provide that information.

According to Ross, the number of students enrolled in a class generally stay the same as the class moves from year to year. For example, the number of current sophomores will be the same when they are next year’s juniors.

Until recently enrollment numbers for NNHS as a whole have remained constant.

“We’ve been lucky that our enrollment has been pretty steady at around 3,050-3,150 for the last ten years, so we have either stayed even or gone up in staff,” said Helms.

However, this coming school year has a smaller freshmen class, making enrollment for the building as whole sizably smaller.

“The difference for us is incoming freshman. When we compare that to the kids that will graduate, there is a pretty big difference,” said Ross.

On Monday, April 7, Ross brought forth the final staffing allocation plan to the school board.

“We value our teachers very much. Whenever there is a reduction, we hope to help them find work at [another District 203 school],” said Ross.