Enrollment is rising at the Fayette school district heading into the new year, and Superintendent Brent Doolin reported a higher-than-expected fund balance and said that campus improvements are nearly complete.

New student enrollment rose in all three buildings ahead of the school year that began on Tuesday, with at least 20 new students expected at the high school, according to Principal Ross Dobson. New Daly Elementary Principal Samie Hill reported that seven new students have enrolled in kindergarten, and middle school Principal Abby Arnette projected an enrollment of 165 students this year, up from 144 a year ago.

Building administrators told the district’s Board of Education last week that students have come from as near as New Franklin and Columbia and some from as far as Kansas.

Official enrollment is tallied on the last Wednesday in September.

When students arrived for the first day of school, most building improvements performed during the summer had been completed. Those include new windows at the middle school and ag buildings, new outside doors, a new roof at the high school, and campus-wide upgraded HVAC systems. However, some HVAC work at the high school is still ongoing and could cause some disruptions in the first couple of months of the fall semester. 

In an interview with this newspaper on August 10, Superintendent Brent Doolin said that he hopes HVAC work at the high school is completed by November 1 and cites supply shortages as the cause of the delays.

“The supply chain is the biggest frustration. We’re going to have some noise and mess and things to work around and have to manage,” Doolin explained. Old ductwork is still in place, so classrooms will still have air conditioning, but individual high school classes will be temporarily relocated for a day or two to allow for the new systems to be installed.

“We’ll have to come up with a schedule. It’ll probably disrupt one teacher’s classroom for a day and a half,” Doolin said.

Elsewhere at the middle school and the ag building, some ceiling tile replacements may cause disruption during the initial weeks of school. Once again, supply issues for construction materials are the culprit for the delays.

Fayette had three teaching vacancies to begin the year. One of which is a second special education teacher. The other two are a preschool teacher and a middle school math and science teacher. 

Michelle Belcher, a retired teacher who can return to the classroom through a state critical shortage program, will fill the preschool teaching position. 

“Normally, you can’t be retired and work full time, but the state has a critical shortage exemption because of the teacher shortage,” Doolin explained. The rule allows districts to hire retired teachers for two years but will soon expand to four years.

The final vacancy is for a third math and science teacher at the middle school. The district currently has two teachers but wants to hire a third to reduce class sizes.

“We added middle school positions last year to alleviate class sizes,” Doolin said. “We have a schedule that works without that position. Without that math and science person, we’re not getting as small of class sizes as we had hoped for.”

In recent years, average class sizes in the middle school have grown from the mid-40s to the mid-50s.

The shortage of the middle school and special education teachers has added to the district’s already robust fund balance. Like every school in the nation, Fayette benefitted from excessive financial payouts made by the federal government during the COVID-19 pandemic. That has allowed Fayette to remain in excellent financial shape.

The final unrestricted fund balance as of the close of the last fiscal year on June 30 sits at 60.21%, far higher than the minimum balance of 25% as set by the board. Other factors that led to the high balance include interest earned from funding that hasn’t yet been paid for delayed HVAC upgrades, better-than-expected revenues from Missouri Proposition C, which draws revenue from motor vehicle taxes, and various other higher-than-expected revenues.

Unfilled teaching positions that were budgeted also added to the high fund balance.

Like many school districts nationwide, Fayette is still short on bus drivers. Despite a recent plea by Supt. Doolin in a Letter to the Editor published in this newspaper in July, no new drivers have applied. The district has just enough drivers to cover routes and extracurricular activities such as sports and band trips, but rescheduling ball games canceled by rainouts could be problematic.

“We’re still very, very strapped for bus drivers,” Doolin said. 

The district maintains six daily bus routes, four of which make in-town bus stops.

Fayette’s bus fleet is fully operational after a collision with a deer last year sidelined one vehicle.