“Our kindergarten class has jumped up to 18 students,” he said. “So overall, we’re up about 10 students [total] from last year.”

Part of that growth may be from the education savings accounts, or ESAs, which provide $7,635 to each qualifying student who is enrolled in an accredited private school.

Sixty out of the 84 students at St. Paul use an ESA to pay for tuition, Hartley said. He expects that number to increase in the next school year as the income requirements to qualify for an ESA loosen.

“We’re going to be cracking that 100 [students enrolled] threshold here pretty soon, which means that we have a third- and fourth-grade combined class that we will be looking to split and make individual classes out of,” Hartley said. “We still want to maintain our small class sizes.”

“I would foresee that within five years, that the school would have one full class of every grade level K-8, and right now we have three combined classes that have two grades,” Hartley said.

Splitting those classes may also lead to the need to reconfigure the classroom setups to make space, he added.

“That’ll be kind of a nice problem to have,” Hartley said.

In addition to the 84 students in K-8 at St. Paul, the school also has 35 preschool students enrolled.

The school hosted its kindergarten roundup this last week and prior to the event, had about 14 families sign up, which is a good sign, Hartley said.

“We’re hoping that with a pretty small eighth-grade class graduating this year, we’ll be able to bring in a larger kindergarten class again, and that will push our numbers close to 100 students,” he said.

The extra money from the ESAs have also had a physical impact on the school, Hartley said.

The school has also been able to do some interior updates like painting the cafeteria and hallways and upgrading new lights in the gymnasium, he said.

“We’ve been able to raise our tuition a little bit and still be able to take care of the families that we have, not wanting anybody to have to pay more now than they did prior to our tuition raises,” he said.

St. Paul welcomed a new kindergarten teacher this year — Shawn Russell, who retired from teaching kindergarten at the Fort Dodge public schools last year.

For next year, St. Paul is hoping to hire two more staff members, Hartley said.

Because of the use of ESAs, St. Paul will be participating in the ISASP state standardized testing this year, Hartley said.

“We’ll be able to better compare how we’re doing with other schools in the state,” he said. “It’ll give us a little better look at where we are academically.”

St. Paul also started using a new social-emotional learning curriculum called Friendzy this year.

“It’s a curriculum to help kids identify their emotions and to help kids learn how to communicate and how to work with others,” Hartley said.

A big focus this last year at St. Paul has been on safety and security. Using the Governor’s Safety and Security Grant, the school did a vulnerability study to identify places to make improvements on the school’s security system.

“We had a gentleman come in and map out the whole building, as they’ve done in all school buildings throughout the state,” Hartley said. “And then we had to make sure that we’ve identified all the rooms and doors and everything so that now those maps are put on file with the police department and the sheriff’s department, so if something would happen here, they could grab those maps and know exactly where to go and what to look for.”

When the church was rebuilt after a fire on May 13, 1999, new doors and hallways were added to connect the two buildings, which aren’t on previous maps made of the school, Hartley said.

“So this is a good way to update and to make sure that everybody knows where things are,” he said.