Sturgeon Bay High School enrollment drops under 400

• Sturgeon Bay High School Enrollment has dropped below 400 this year for the first time. Superintendent Joe Stutting said the school graduated 122 students last year but saw an incoming freshman class of just 83 students, dropping enrollment slightly below 400. Just 10 years ago, in the 2001-2002 school year the school claimed 552 high school students.

“It’s not just a trend here, it’s a trend for rural schools all across Wisconsin,” Stutting said. “It’s not unusual, but it does have a dramatic impact on our budget.”

Stutting said the sixth grade class in the district is small as well, but the high school enrollment for the school should stabilize at about 400 students.

• Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker joined governors Mitch Daniels of Indiana and John Kasich of Ohio in calling on New York governor Andrew Cuomo to relax ballast discharge regulations.

New York is scheduled to put the strongest ballast discharge rule on the Great Lakes into effect in mid-2013. New York’s standards for existing vessels are 100 times more stringent than those developed by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and 1,000 times more stringent for vessels built after Jan. 1, 2013. More from Dan Egan in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel here>>