Student enrollment at the Seine River School Division is down for the first time in over a decade.

With 4,509 students currently enrolled, Superintendent Mike Borgfjord says they are down 8 from last year. He notes that they had originally budgeted for an increase of between 50 and 100 students so this drop was unexpected.

Board Chair Wendy Bloomfield was equally surprised: “I don’t remember the last time there was a decrease.”

Bloomfield suggests one reason for this decrease could be a new private school that recently launched in Lorette. She says the school seems to be attracting students from several families who were formerly part of the division.

According to Bloomfield, Dawson Trail School and Lorette Collegiate suffered the heaviest losses. Still, she says the impact is fairly spread out with the division losing a handful of students from almost every grade.

“The interesting thing is that our kindergarten enrollment is up significantly from what we projected,” she remarks, “we have 399 students when French and English schools are combined and we projected 380.”

Neither Bloomfield or Borgfjord believe the low enrollment numbers mark the beginning of a downward trend. Both expect to see the student population increase again in the 2020-2021 school year.

Meanwhile, at a recent school board meeting, Bloomfield was re-elected into her 29th year as board chair and fellow trustee Greg Reid was re-elected as vice-chair.