West Wendover Elementary lost almost a full class while across the border Anna Smith Elementary gain one according to first day enrollment reports.
According to the first day counts 577 nevada elemantary students should up for class Monday, down from the 602 reporting last year.
At the Anna Smith Elemtary the reverse was true with 281 starting the first day of school compared with 258 last year.
Those number may however not hold. Traditionally in Wendover a small but significant number of children do not start school until after the Labor Day holiday. The offcial final count is in mid September for the Neva side school and in early October for Utah.
At the junior high and high schools levels the swings were much more moderate. At West Wendover High School 470 students were counted on the first day up six from 2012. Wendover High School reported 192 students down six from last year.
Until this recently both sides of town mirrored each other more or less in school enrollment. While the Nevada side’s school population has always been much larger than the Utah side both sides gained or lost students at relatively the same rates as the other.
The StateLine bankruptcy and the Great Recession both had a devastating impact on the population of both sides of town and both sides school enrollments. The West Wendover Elementary school for example lost about 30 students the equivalent of a class every year for five years from 2003 to 2009.
According to the census there are now 4,410 people in Wendover a drop of 6.6 percent from the 4,721 counted in 2000 and more importantly a drop of more than 10 percent from its estimated population of a bout 5,000 from the state demographers office.
West Wendover’s population decline has also spilled across the border into Wendover, Utah. The much smaller sister city also reported a decline of about 10 percent.
In the past five years Wendover, Utah however has shown signs of great resiliency than its larger sister to the west. while no where near a complete recovery Wendover, Utah has logged some notable new development such as the new Nugget RV Park, the expanded Shell Service Center and the Dollar Store. West Wendover, Nevada on the other hand has met with little success apart from the addition of the Smith’s Gas Station the only large project West Wendover has seen in almost a decade was the City Hall and a city paid for industrial park that so far has one tenant.
This greater resiliency may be reflected in this years school population numbers as well.
Another cause for Utah’s increase could be in the easier access to local, state and federal government financial assistance.
While West Wendover, Nevada’s poor must travel to either Elko or Ely to even apply for financial aid Tooele County administers many of the same programs from its offices in Wendover, Utah City Hall.
