Enrollment numbers are on target to meet projections, according to Fort mill School District officials.

As of Thursday, Aug. 21, the second day of school, 9,279 students showed up. That's 300 less than the district's projected student body population of 9,579 students this year, but officials said the attendance numbers tend to fluctuate during the first 10 days of school.

A "firm" number should be available after Labor Day.

"For some reason it all seems to smooth out after Labor Day," Superintendent Dr. Keith Callicutt said.

Last spring, the district ended the year with a student population of 8,853, according to Assistant Superintendent Leann Lordo.

The district began the year with enrollment freezes in place at three of its five elementary schools. Springfield Elementary, for example, was designed for 900 students but has approximately 1,000 this year even with the freeze in place, according to Principal Scott Frattaroli.

The district installed several mobile units at the school to provide extra classroom space.

However, with two new elementary schools - Pleasant Knoll Elementary on Pleasant Road and Sugar Creek Elementary near Nation Ford High School - under construction, this should be the last year with enrollment freezes at the elementary school level for at least several years, Callicutt said. The school district has commitments for donations of two more elementary school sites, one in the Kanawha development off Sutton Road near I-77, and the other on Doby's Bridge Road in the Massey development. And the district is in negotiations on another elementary school site, a site for a middle school and potentially a site for another high school.

"They're doing what's called due diligence on those sites, trying to make sure [the Office of School Facilities] and the [S.C. Department of Transportation] will approve them," Callicutt said, referring to the agencies that have to sign off on the sites under negotiation. "You don't want to go through all those lengthy negotiations just to have the state not approve them."

If the district is able to secure all three sites, it will have acquired all the sites that will be necessary under its long range plans. The negotiations on the elementary and middle school sites are farther along than the high school site, and according to the district's 10-year Facilities Needs Study, the elementary and middle school will be needed sooner than a third high school.

"We hope we won't need the high school until 2015," Callicutt said. "But the bottom line is, if we don't find that site soon, we won't have 100 acres available anywhere in the district."

With the ongoing economic troubles nationally beginning to affect the local market, those schools may not be needed as soon as originally thought, Callicutt said.

"What we're going to be interested in this year is seeing the effect of the economic slowdown," he said. "It may buy us some time if we don't meet enrollment projections in the coming years. We said all along (the 10-year Facilities Needs Study) all depends on holding to our projections."

Callicutt and other district officials meet annually to reevaluate the 10-year plan and update it if necessary. But there are other challenges.

"I wish I felt as good about our financial future as I do about our facilities future," Callicutt said.

The district is already facing a funding shortfall of as much as $6 million from the state law that took away school districts' ability to use residential property taxes to fund district operations. That law, known as Act 388, replaced property taxes with a 1-cent sales tax. Now the state is telling school districts to expect cuts in state funding through the Education Finance Act and the Education Improvement Act in October.

That could translate to a midyear funding cut of $800,000 or more, Callicutt said. He plans to ask the school board to use some of the districts general fund balance, now at approximately $13 million, to cover the shortfall this year. Next year, though, the board will be faced with some tough decisions on where to cut money from the budget, which could result in larger class sizes.

Long-term the state needs to come up with new revenue streams, allow greater flexibility in the way school districts use that money and do away with some of the largely unfunded mandates, he said. Using the fund balance to cover shortfalls is not a good policy year after year, he said, because the health of a district's fund balance, which should be enough to cover at least three months of operating expenses, affects a district's bond rating.

"We're a little over halfway home in funding facilities construction, but in two to three years we'll have to get more bonds," Callicutt said. "If the fund balance is out of whack we won't get as good of rates (as we've had in the past)."

Higher interest rates on bonds translates into a larger bill for tax payers, he said.