Official Count Places Piper High Enrollment Above 2,400 Students

Piper High School in Sunrise reported 2,428 students enrolled for the 2004-05 school year in the official 20-day count released this week by Broward County Public Schools, putting the central Sunrise campus among the larger comprehensive high schools in the district. The count, taken on the 20th day of classes and used by the district to lock in staffing ratios and per-pupil funding allocations for the rest of the year, lists 1,274 boys and 1,154 girls on the school's rolls.

The number is consistent with district projections from the spring boundary-planning cycle and reflects continued growth across central and west Broward. Piper opened in 1971 and has grown steadily through several rounds of population expansion in the surrounding Sunrise neighborhoods. The 2004-05 figure represents an increase from prior years and adds to the case the district has been making for additional capacity at several west Broward campuses.

The 20-day count is one of the district's two formal enrollment benchmarks, paired with the survey-day count later in the year. Both reports feed into the funding formula the state of Florida uses to distribute education dollars to districts under the Florida Education Finance Program, with adjustments built in for class-size compliance, English-learner programs, special-education services and other categorical lines. For a school the size of Piper, each enrolled student translates into several thousand dollars of annual operating funding.

At the campus level, the count is most visible in everyday operations. Cafeteria contracts have been sized for the larger enrollment. The school's bell schedule includes multiple lunch waves to manage flow through the cafeteria. Bus routes serving Piper have been adjusted to handle the boundary additions added during the previous spring's rezoning cycle. The school's administration, led by principal Dr. Constance Tuman-Rugg, has continued the existing portable-classroom configuration on the back of the campus to accommodate enrollment above the building's permanent classroom capacity.

Broward as a district enrolled more than 270,000 students this fall, placing the system among the largest in the country. Piper's 2,428 figure puts the school in roughly the same tier as Plantation, South Plantation, Western and Cooper City high schools — the central and west Broward comprehensive campuses whose attendance areas overlap with the rapidly developing communities along Sunrise Boulevard, University Drive and the Sawgrass Expressway corridor.