Falls Church City Public Schools Superintendent Peter Noonan reported to the News-Press yesterday that the official preliminary student enrollment number for the City’s schools is down by 53 as of Sept. 30, compared to the same day a year ago. He noted that the enrollment drop appears in the kindergarten-fifth grade level, even as they increased at the secondary grades 6-12 level. On Sept. 30, 2017, there were 2,698 students in the system, and this Sept. 30 the total number was 2,645.

Noonan said, “Please consider that numbers without context have no meaning. We will continue to monitor enrollments which continue to come in for a variety of reasons including events around the world. We continue to have high confidence in Weldon Cooper, the state’s demographer. We will continue to verify and track enrollment trends that can further serve to validate our methodology.”