Anthony Goddeau hops off the bus with a grin at Bloomingdale Elementary School on Thursday before boarding a bus to Petrova Elementary for his first day of fifth grade. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Marbone)

SARANAC LAKE — For the first time in years, Saranac Lake Central School District’s student enrollment has dipped below 1,000 on opening day.

The district reported 984 students enrolled on opening day — 60 fewer than reported on opening day last year and a drop into the triple digits.

SLCSD Superintendent Diane Fox said these numbers are still in flux. The final count usually changes by up to 50 students between now and October, when the district officially reports its enrollment to the state.

With a graduating class of 87 in June and a kindergarten class of 44 on opening day Thursday, Fox said the drop was expected.

The district has been experiencing a long, slow student decline for several decades now. In the 2014-15 school year, the district had 1,266 students. At the turn of the millennium, it had 1,743 students.

Student numbers declining has an impact on the whole district. Fox said the staff reductions in this year’s budget are a result of having fewer students. It led all students in third, fourth and fifth grades to now attend Petrova Elementary after the district cut its Bloomingdale Elementary classroom for these grade levels over the summer.

It has also led to a discussion over if the district should close Bloomingdale Elementary entirely. This concept has been highly controversial. The school board has created a “facilities planning committee” to look at the district’s options, which is made up of members of the public, school representatives and board members.

The facilities planning committee meets for the first time on Sept. 17 at 5:30 p.m. in the high school library. This meeting will be open to the public to attend, but will not be streamed online like the school board’s meetings.

Fox has long talked about a “three-legged stool” of requirements for families — child care, housing and employment. The Adirondacks are short on all three. Fox asks herself, “Who can afford to live here?” Often, her answer is, “not new parents.”

Homes cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, childcare costs hundreds of dollars a week and there are not many high-paying jobs in the area, not many jobs at all. These issues are larger than the district and outside of its power. Fox said she does what she can to encourage solutions to them, and she’s been ringing the alarm bell about the crisis they are creating for years, but the large-scale community effort required to solve them has not materialized yet.

“I feel like I’m a bit of a broken record,” she said.

On opening day, the district had 49 students in kindergarten to second grade at Bloomingdale Elementary, 311 in kindergarten to fifth grade at Petrova Elementary, 254 in grades six to eight at the Middle School at Petrova and 370 in grades 9 to 12 at the High School.

The district also has 18 students in a new universal pre-K program at Bloomingdale.

The enrollment decline appears poised to continue in the future. High school class enrollment is larger than elementary school class enrollment across the board. The high school is the only place where the number of students in a grade level rises above 100. In the elementary grade levels, these grades mostly have around 60 to 70 students.

There are 46 homeschooled students in the district this year, a few fewer than last year. Before the coronavirus pandemic, the number of homeschooled children in the district had been in the 20s for around a decade. Before that, it had been higher — in the 40s.