Norwich — When the John B. Stanton School first received funding in the state's new Commissioner's Network School program in 2012-13, the $1.3 milion grant paid for classroom interventions and individual attention to boost student performance.

The plan envisioned that students would improve as they advanced through elementary grades and prepared for middle school, their academic success showing on annual state standardized tests.

But schools can only measure progress of the students still in their classrooms.

Norwich Public Schools is tracking an ongoing problem of high enrollment turnover, some schools affected more than others.

Overall in March, 46 students entered new schools in the district, and another 45 students left their schools, with 16 moving out of the district and another 17 out of the state.

Unlike most eastern Connecticut school districts, Norwich enrollment is not projected to drop in the coming years but is forecast to remain stable. What Superintendent Abby Dolliver and Norwich principals want to show is that they are not necessarily the same students.

At Stanton, 66 kindergartners entered the school in 2012-13, the first year of the Commissioner's Network grant.

Three school years, later, only 24 of those students, 36 percent, are in Stanton third grade, Principal Billie Shea told the Board of Education last week during a presentation to illustrate the district's transiency issue.

Only 60 percent of last year's kindergarteners are still at Stanton.

Shea and Samuel Huntington School Principal Siobhan O'Connor used their schools' transiency statistics to highlight the trend and to describe the academic challenges teachers face with an ever-changing classroom.

A student feeling the stress of moving, losing friends and entering a new class might need extra help from the classroom teacher, a school psychologist and maybe a social worker.

Students also shift their attention to the new classmates, disrupting both academic and social routines, the principals said.

“I've had five new students in the past three weeks, so five classrooms are going through it,” O'Connor said, “and there is some loss of instructional time.”

Shea kept track of the academic performance of the 24 kindergarteners from 2012-13 as they progressed through third grade this year and received the Network School grant-funded academic enhancement.

By the end of their kindergarten year, 92 percent of those students scored at or above grade level in reading.

By third grade, 85 percent still achieved that level, while 63 percent of the overall third-grade class was reading at or above grade level.

“We don't have many students long enough to make an impact,” Dolliver said.

This year alone, 88 new students have enrolled at Stanton since school started, with 26 percent of them moving in from other Norwich schools.

At the same time, 85 students moved out of Stanton, 38 percent moving to other Norwich schools.

Enrollment remains relatively stable at 341 students, but not the same students.

Stanton sits in a West Side neighborhood with many families who rent apartments and might have jobs or financial situations that force them to move frequently.

Huntington, with an enrollment of 352, is seen as more stable district with more single-family homes along with a mixture of rental housing.

Yet at Huntington, only 34 of the 68 students, 52 percent, who started kindergarten three years ago are still at the school. And 74 percent of last year's kindergartners are at Huntington this year as first-graders.

Huntington has 73 new students this year, while 100 students left the school.

“Stanton and Huntington are representative of what we see across the district at the elementary school level,” the principals' report said.

Year-to-date statistics for the entire school system will be compiled at the end of the school year, showing how many students have moved into and out of the school system and where they went.

Dolliver said she has not seen a growing trend of families moving out of city schools because of anticipated budget cuts expected to lead to teacher layoffs and larger class sizes.

She said some families have said they are looking at charter, magnet or private schools for middle school because of high enrollment at the Teachers' Memorial Sixth Grade Academy and at Kelly Middle School.

A School Facilities Review Committee is studying a possible major restructuring of city schools that could address moves from one Norwich school to another.

If schools are restructured by grade level — one or two schools for all kindergarten through second-grade students for example — students in families who move within Norwich likely would remain in the same school.

"That would cut out the intra-district moving, but not the rest," Dolliver said.

In March, only six of the students who moved into one Norwich school came from another Norwich school, while 40 were new to the district.

c.bessette@theday.com