At Wednesday night’s School Committee, Weston Public Schools enrollment numbers were presented for 2021-2022. One thing is clear: the Class of 2025 could eat a couple of the others for lunch. That would be the freshman (grade 9) class and it’s always been a brute. Note that two owlets are in that class and the Owl is not unbiased in covering any attempts to cut back classes in the high school.

The snapshot taken of enrollment on August 26, 2021 shows that we have 1,972 students enrolled in the public school system for 2021-22. This is a gain of 66 students over the 2020-2021 number (1,907). Just to add depth (and perhaps control for the pandemic effect), a look at 2019-2020 actual enrollment shows 2,039 students overall.

Please note that predicted FY 22 enrollment was 1,873 back when the report was made last October. That was an undersell of 99 students. I will say that the prediction for the class of 2025 was absolutely spot-on. But more on that later.

Let’s look at the numbers, shall we? Starting with the littles for School Year 2021-2022 as of August 26:

Note that anyone who makes fun of Owl graphic capability gets immediately banned from this page. Or forced to work here unpaid.

Here’s the super analytics on this: Who ate 20 fourth graders? While the other elementary grades are 141-5 students, the fourth grade is not. Why is that? Someone give me a random reason. Just as a comparison, the Class of 2025 (current 9th graders) had 190 students enrolled in fourth grade!!! Any fellow parents of this class will remember some exciting meetings where we came with pitchforks to protest 8 sections rather than 9. It was ugly. The small current fourth-grade class will have 6 sections.

Onwards to middle school, shall we? No one ever wants to go back to middle school, but here you have to. The Weston Middle School RULES–Hi John and Phil! I miss you already. Ahem.

Okay, so this group of grades seems to be largely the same size. Cool, cool. 151 is the number…I did hear there are 38 new families enjoying the middle school so let me see what predictions were vs actual…hold please…oh oops, we didn’t do so well there either. The predicted class sizes were 144, 141 and 144 summing to 429. No worries, close enough.

And now for the mighty high school, go ‘cats.

Holy bubble class, Batman! Look at that class of 2025–who after eating 17 fourth graders, is exactly 17 above the average number of the other high school classes. Seriously, do you not find that suspicious? I do. What exactly was going on in 2006 and 2007 when these kids were born? More analysis on this when I hire a high school intern.

Some primary research on the soccer fields showed that this bubble class is making itself known–there were 30 freshman boys out of the 56 that came for pre-season tryouts this week. Note to School Committee: let’s not be cutting any electives just yet, okay? Please and thank you.

Also mentioned as a reason that the numbers are up at the high school: 34 new families. Welcome to Weston, please don’t join the Class of 2025. I’m kidding, welcome aboard! [update 8/29: one more family arrived to the high school on Friday to make 35!]

Any and all of these numbers can be checked on the School Enrollment webpage, though the numbers for 2021-2022 are not yet on the site. You’ll have to trust the Owl on this. Oh, and the School Committee recording here.

Go ‘Cats!