The school district must cut spending by $400,000 for the current school year following an unprecedented and unexpected drop in enrollment.

The latest count shows 3,992 students in Bainbridge schools, 92 fewer than projected and 58 fewer than the district had last year.

Officials expect the number to increase slightly as students return from extended summer vacations, but still believe the final count will be at least 80 students fewer than the district had budgeted.

“For the first time in modern history, enrollment is down,” Superintendent Ken Crawford said at a Thursday meeting of the Bainbridge school board. “We need to understand whether this is an anomaly or in fact this has become a new trend.”

The most dramatic drops were in the lower elementary grades, something Crawford said the district expected to happen eventually, but not this soon. Grades 10 and 11 also experienced unexpected drops, while Bainbridge High School’s freshman class showed gains.

Similar enrollment trends have occurred elsewhere in the county and across Puget Sound, including in the Central Kitsap School District, where this year’s enrollment dipped by 300 students. North Kitsap and Bremerton school districts also saw notable declines, as did Mercer Island School District, which is down 117 students.

The reasons behind the decline are unknown, but Crawford and board members pointed to rising home costs, high-stakes testing, increased competition with private schools and moves by military families as possibilities.

The biggest single impact was the departure of some 134 students whose families moved off the island over the summer.

About 75 percent of school funding – which is based on enrollment projections – comes from the state. The district receives roughly $4,700 per student to pay for operating costs.

The 2006-07 budget for Bainbridge schools is just over $34.1 million.

By overshooting its enrollment projections, the district must make up the lost revenue elsewhere, a problem compounded by spending that is already expected to exceed revenue by $312,949.

School board president Bruce Weiland said the cuts would likely come from a “grab bag” of 15 or 20 things, but no decisions have been made about where specific cuts will be made.

“We’re by no means in crisis mode, but we do need to start making some decisions,” Weiland said. “The key, of course, is to protect student learning and instruction.”

The news also means the district must re-evaluate its demographic information, which is used to plan for future capital projects. Doing so will be especially important at the elementary school level, where shrinking enrollment could impact what happens to those facilities.

Earlier this summer, Crawford said the aging Blakely and Wilkes elementary schools would eventually need renovation.

Bainbridge schools count students monthly and the district regularly monitors trends and countywide birthrates to predict future needs.

Bainbridge High School Principal Brent Peterson said his school relies heavily on spring pre-registration data to project its enrollment and staff teachers.

“As the dust settles on the school year we usually find we have pretty solid information,” he said. “But there were some (departing) students that didn’t show up in the spring (count).”

Still, BHS fared well, with a larger-than-expected freshman class compensating for drops in other grades and putting the school near its target for the year.

Peterson said the school tries to collect information from each departing student about why they left the school.

Despite the district’s overall drop in enrollment, the board acknowledged that overloads do exist in specific classrooms.

It also discussed the district’s long-running policy of hiring teachers in the spring instead of waiting until students arrive in September so the school has a more accurate enrollment count.

The district has in the past based its hiring policy on the premise that the best candidates have already been hired by the time school starts.

Though the decline in enrollment is unprecedented, missed projections are not unheard of.

In 2000, officials overestimated growth by 2.6 percent, leading to more than $1 million in spending adjustments.

Crawford said the budget situation back then was more dire and that the district is in a more “solid” position to address the problem this time around.

He said a solution will be brought to the board within the next month.

“We’re going to examine this closely,” he said. “We don’t want to make any assumptions.”