Baldwin High School is boasting its highest enrollment ever, with 458 students currently enrolled to study at BHS for the 2012-13 school year. This is quite a jump from last year’s enrollment of 424. The increase in enrollment can be attributed to large freshmen and sophomore classes.The senior class has 106 students and the juniors only 103, while the sophomore and freshman classes have numbers of 123 and 126.

The immediate effect of having a higher enrollment is larger class sizes, according to

Social Studies teacher Jason Crowder.

“There are just some things you can’t do with a class of 30 that you can with a class of 15 or 20,” Crowder said. “The freshman are a very mature class and that helps keep things running smooth but it still may take a few more days for me to grade papers.”

State funding programs look at a district as a whole when deciding how to distribute money so the more kids a district has the more state funding it gets.

“As a whole the USD348 school district is slightly down in enrollment from last year because of a small kindergarten class so we are actually working with less money.” BHS Principal Rob McKim said.

There is an upside to BHS’s larger enrollment.

“You can now make more friends,” sophomore Brooke Hoobler said.