A few days before campuses on the traditional calendar re-opened for the 2013-14 school year, IUSD quietly hit a significant milestone: Enrollment climbed past 30,000 students.
Marty Danko, the district's director of Information Services, tells us it happened at 1:27 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 6, as students were completing the registration process. The total student population now sits at about 30,060 -- and 40,000 isn’t as far away as it looks.
With new residential development picking up on the city’s northern end, IUSD has become one of the fastest growing school districts in the nation, if not the fastest.
“Within the next seven years, we will be well over 40,000 students, which is a staggering amount of growth,” Superintendent Terry Walker recently told the City.
To keep pace with that growth, the district plans to open seven new schools by the end of 2020, including a fifth comprehensive high school being developed for 2016.