Summit High School Bend-La Pine’s $29 million solution to relieve overcrowding at Bend and Mountain View high schools seems to have already served its purpose.

Sort of.

Summit opened its doors for the first time this week with 910 freshmen, sophomores and juniors, decreasing enrollment at Bend High School by 448 students. Bend High went from 102 percent of capacity last year to 70 percent of capacity with its new enrollment this week of 1,062.

Summit also helped enrollment at Mountain View drop by 272 students to 1,604. But Mountain View still is packed to 115 percent of capacity.

The latest figures available from the district are from Wednesday, and the numbers seem to be changing daily.

”The realization is that while we hoped to reduce more students at Mountain View, because it was more overcrowded than Bend, the exact opposite happened,” district Superintendent Doug Nelson said.

”The boundary committee did a good job. But things change.”

What that means for future Bend, Mountain View and Summit high school students is yet to be seen, Nelson said.

The district certainly will look at boundary issues to spread out the high school student population more evenly, he said.

But, Nelson promised, students won’t be pulled from one school and sent to another.

”We’re not going to wholesale move students around,” he said. ”That’s not part of the conversation.”

Bob Jones, principal at Mountain View, said the school might still be over capacity, but the Cougars are finding it a little easier to breathe this year.

”It’s still crowded, but it seems like it is a lot easier to move around the hallways and there’s a little more space in the commons now,” Jones said. ”I think (Summit opening) helped.”

Overall, Bend-La Pine started the school year with 222 more students than it did last year.

Enrollment is expected to increase even more through the fall, because some families are still on vacation and some students have yet to register. Last year enrollment in Bend-La Pine increased by 283 students between Sept. 6 and Jan. 8.

”Right now we have a few schools with lower numbers than last year, but we see enrollment increases throughout September and into the fall,” district spokeswoman Laurie Gould said. ”We expect to be very close to our projection of 13,000 students.”

The projections are important.

School districts base annual budgets on the amount of money they will get from the state for each of their students.

Districts can usually get by if their enrollment projections are a few students off, but a massive enrollment estimation blunder can send districts scrambling to find money they hoped the state was going to provide.

The state bases per-pupil funding on student head counts in October about $4,916 per student.

In Redmond, the first week enrollment of 5,855 is 257 students more than at the start of last year. That’s about 20 students more than the district expected.

”The numbers are very erratic at the start, so we’ll see,” Redmond Superintendent Jerry Colonna said.

The Sisters School District started classes this week with 37 fewer students than this time last year, but officials there also said the number changes daily. Enrollment this week in Sisters was at 1,052.

Jefferson County reported an enrollment of 2,897, about 100 fewer students than the district started with last year.

The Crook County school district did not have first-week figures as of Friday afternoon.

In Bend, enrollment skyrocketed at the Highland Elementary at Kenwood magnet school after it added classes in kindergarten, first grade and second grade.

The district expanded the popular program to make it available to more people and to alleviate some of the overcrowding at High Lakes Elementary School. As soon as the construction of High Lakes was completed last year, it was above capacity.

West siders responded.

Enrollment at Highland School increased by 129 students, jumping from 157 to 286. The school still has a waiting list of about 100 people.

Four elementary schools opened this week above capacity Buckingham, High Lakes, Lava Ridge and Westside Village.

”It helped, but we hoped it would have helped a little more,” Nelson said. ”We’ll probably look at shifting some staff from other schools to High Lakes,” to help with the crowded classrooms there.

Portable classrooms for kindergarten classes were added to Buckingham and Lava Ridge.

High Desert Middle School opened at capacity with 796 students.