The Hood River County School District has included in its budget for the upcoming school year flexibility to deal with difficult to project kindergarten and first grade class sizes coming out of the pandemic.  District Superintendent Rich Polkinghorn says they are still gathering numbers, but they know kindergarten numbers were down this current school year and there has been a feeling that parents held kids back a year to allow them to start in a more normal setting.  He’s anticipating larger than usual kindergarten and first grade enrollment, but they have put money into a contingency budget to deal with it.  Polkinghorn says they already know Parkdale Elementary will have a very large kindergarten class in September, so more staffing has been allocated for that.