Thursday was an important date for schools in Utah as they submitted membership and enrollment totals to the state of Utah.

The big questions for school districts this year is how those numbers will be impacted by the soft closure of schools in March that resulted in students moving to online instruction.

On Thursday, the Utah State School Board met and approved an attendance proration method that could be the answer to those questions surrounding school district counts.

“Everyone will recall that the COVID-19 situation occurred and affected last school year,” Utah Deputy Superintendent Scott Jones said during the meeting. “If everyone recalls it was roughly around March 16 that we went to what was called a soft closure. There was great concern about average daily membership.”

According to the State Board’s website the Minimum School Program funds, also known as MSP, are distributed based on formulas provided to the state. These formulas form their data from the prior year’s Average Daily Membership, or ADM.

ADM comes from aggregate membership plus a growth factor that is calculated based on fall enrollment counts.

“Because of the unique circumstance we are in, and because we are funded on Average Daily Membership and growth, this may be a methodology we can apply given the circumstances that occurred last year,” Jones added during the meeting.

The prorated methodology allows schools to better represent what their yearly membership could have looked like if the COVID-19 pandemic would not have led to a soft closure.

This new method for counting enrollment totals comes after the announcement of an estimated 2,150 drop in enrollment throughout the state based on unofficial September counts.

The allocation given to schools to pay for a single student’s instructional costs is referred to as WPU, or Weighted Pupil Unit.

As for schools in Utah County, according to an unofficial budget estimation done based on the unofficial September counts mentioned above, the WPU percent change from the 2021 estimates to the estimates with the prorated method are in the negative for the Alpine School District and Provo School District.

The two show similar negative percentages in kindergarten WPU and first through 12th grade WPU, with kindergarten numbers at -5.42% for Alpine and -5.96% for Provo.

Both school districts were under -1% difference for first through 12th grade WPU.

The Nebo School District was in the negative for kindergarten WPU difference, but was above 1% for first through 12th grade WPU.