In his first formal report, the new superintendent in South Portland details the opportunities and struggles of the district.

The growing diversity of the students attending South Portland schools is presenting a new set of challenges and opportunities, Superintendent Ken Kunin told city leaders Monday.

At a joint workshop of the City Council and the Board of Education, Kunin gave his first State of the Schools report, which was designed to outline “how we’re doing and where we’re going,” he said.

Kunin was hired as the new superintendent this past summer, after longtime school leader Suzanne Godin retired.

After Monday’s meeting, Kunin told the Current that he’s still learning a lot about the school district, but also praised those in attendance for their “many good questions.”

While Kunin said the State of the Schools report is “intended to be a broad view,” it was clear that several issues are likely to have an impact on the 2015-2016 fiscal year budget.

Among those budget impacts will likely be a need for more staff to assist the growing numbers of students for whom English is not their first language.

According to the figures presented by Kunin, just from the last school year to the current one, there’s been a big jump in the number of English Language Learners district-wide, but particularly at the high school.

And, the number of different languages spoken at home has also jumped with the majority of English Language Learners either speaking Spanish or Arabic, with the next highest group being speakers of Somali.

There is even a small pocket of students for whom Portuguese is their original language. Some of the other languages being spoken by students in South Portland range from Urdu to Hindi.

Following Monday’s meeting, Dick Matthews, chairman of the school board, told the Current that addressing the needs of the growing number of English Language Learners would be important going forward.

He noted that the school district has not increased staffing for its English Language Learners program since 2011.

“This will need to be looked at in the next budget,” he said.

In addition to the increase in the number of English Language Learners, the South Portland schools are also seeing a jump in the number of students qualifying for special education.

Nearly 18 percent of students qualify for some type of special help, with the number of students with autism, in particular, on the rise.

Matthews believes the increase in special-needs students seen in South Portland is partly related to the school district “embracing special education,” which is attracting people with special-needs children to town.

“I think people recognize we have a strong program here,” he added.

Matthews also said that one of the benefits of hiring Kunin to lead the school district is that he has “many, many years of experience in the special education field.”

In all, he said, it’s cheaper for the school district to keep students with special needs enrolled in the city’s schools, as opposed to sending them out of district. But there is still likely to be a budgetary impact based on the number of students needing accommodation, Matthews said.

Matthews also said there’s been “dramatic improvement” in efforts to cut down chronic absenteeism, which has been a focus for the school district during the past couple years.

Daily attendance at the elementary and middle schools is above 95 percent, and the high school’s daily attendance rate is 92 percent, according to Kunin.

In addition, both the high school and the middle schools have seen a significant drop in the number of students who are chronically absent, which is defined as missing 18 or more school days a year.

Matthews called the daily attendance rates “just fantastic” and he’s also pleased with the drop in the number of overall absences.

The school district also seems to be doing well with the number of graduates seeking post-secondary education and in the number of students at the high school challenging themselves with Advanced Placement courses.

Kunin said 55 percent of the class of 2015 is attending a four-year college or university, with another 22 percent attending a two-year college.

Among the colleges where South Portland students have been accepted, several are in the Ivy League, including Yale and Dartmouth, while others are highly ranked, including Bates and Bowdoin colleges in Maine.

In all, last academic year, 898 students at South Portland High School were enrolled in Advanced Placement courses, which run the gamut from science and math to English literature to music theory and government and politics.

Of the students who took the annual AP exams, more than 63 percent received a score of 3 or more, which is 2 points above the nearly 61 percent worldwide.

However, Kunin said, there is room for improvement, particularly in the area of mathematics at the high school, with 11th-graders scoring 2 points lower on the annual Maine Education Assessment test than their counterparts across the state.

Overall, though, Matthews feels the South Portland School Department is in “good shape right now and Ken has some good educational goals,” as well as “a good grip on how to proceed.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Mayor Linda Cohen, who told the Current, “I think the Board of Education made an excellent choice when it hired Ken Kunin. I believe our school system will benefit greatly from his knowledge and experience.”

Also on Monday, there was a lot of discussion about whether the city’s two middle schools, Mahoney and Memorial, should be consolidated into one new facility.

Matthews, who is a member of the Middle School Facilities Committee, said he was “still struggling in terms of what would be best.”

But, he also said it’s important for the school district to develop a middle-school plan moving forward.