By Jenn Watt

A rumour that 300 students from cottaging households had registered in Haliburton schools this fall was an inflated number, the school board’s director of education said at a meeting last week.

Asked by Trillium Lakelands District School Board’s Haliburton trustee Gary Brohman for updated numbers, Wesley Hahn said he would look into it, but that the number Brohman had heard wasn’t accurate.
“No, those numbers are quite inflated. We were looking at those numbers and we’ll have a better idea, but not nearly that many. We’ve heard that rumour kind of floating around before, but that isn’t necessarily where we are right now, but we’ll bring an accurate number for you, if we can get that,” Hahn said during the trustees’ committee of the whole meeting on Sept. 8.

Following the meeting, a spokesperson for the school board told the Times that TLDSB doesn’t have a way of counting students from seasonal residences versus students from year-round households.
“There have been no significant increases across the board in terms of enrolment,” Sinead Fegan emailed in response to a question from the Times. “We do not collect data to determine if a student is a seasonal resident, so would have no way to answer that question.”

With files from Sue Tiffin