Day after day, plan after plan, house after house going up and yet, enrollment remains steady throughout the Bellbrook-Sugarcreek School District.
With another 80+ houses planned right next to the middle school in the coming years, the district still does not expect to see an untenable influx of students in the near future.
Years ago, when there was a boom in the construction of homes and apartments in the City of Bellbrook and Sugarcreek Township – there was the expectation that district enrollment would rise, but the numbers say the district hasn’t seen a significant bump in its student population.
This school year, the district has 2,716 students in its buildings, an increase of just 23 total students from the 2023-24 school year. That means the district is near, but still below what enrollment was in 2006 – the highest enrollment has been – which was 2,768.
The chart illustrates the last seven school years, showing the district jumped to over 2,700 students just before COVID, and has just now returned to that level.
The current class of Kindergarten – the smallest in a very long time – is about 150 students, with 141 enrolled for the 2025-26 school year as of March 18, however, the expectation is to have about 170 students in the incoming class, close to the district’s six-year average.
This is one of the reasons the Board of Education recently cemented its plan to divest of the old Sugarcreek Elementary School building. The district kept it for a number of years in case the expected spike in students came, but without evidence of the building’s need in the near future – as well as the cost of renovations to make the building usable for students in our updated digital age and the need to update for accessibility – the usable life of the building for district purposes has come to an end.
The district kept it for a number of years in case the expected spike in students came, but without evidence of the building’s need Though the chart might seem as though there are big jumps, enrollment year-to-year has varied by only about 90 students at the most – about seven students per grade level on average, meaning about one extra student per classroom.