MODOC, Ind. – An Indiana school district is hoping to save itself from financial ruin by recruiting students from China, a move designed to counter years of declining enrollment.

The Union School Corporation, a one-building school district in eastern Indiana, lost 63 students or about 20 percent of its student body between February and September of this year, The Star Press reports.

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The loss means the district now spends more money than it receives in per-pupil funding from the state, which puts the school on a crash course for insolvency in the near future. But the district’s financial adviser managed to pull together enough money from the school’s reserves to make it through the current school year, and officials are banking on new student recruits from China to keep the doors open in the future, according to the Associated Press.

School board president Christa Ellis and others voted to keep the district open in a meeting Sept. 21.

Ellis told The Star Press the district already has a foreign exchange program, but the students the district hopes to recruit from China would pay as much as $30,000 per year for tuition. The cash-strapped school board agreed during a special meeting last month to cover the $2,500 expense to send Union superintendent Allan Hayne to China for the “Global Forum” education forum, which runs from Oct. 10-18, The Star Press reports.

“It would severely lower the deficit if we could take 10 students,” Ellis said. “I don’t see any negatives that wouldn’t be outweighed by the positive.”

The plan to recruit from China is a last ditch effort to save the struggling district after several years of declining enrollment. Union lost $920,000 in funding for the current school year because fewer students enrolled, forcing the district to use about $250,000 from its cash balance to cover costs, according to the news site.

The district ended last school year with about 315 students, and that figure dropped to around 250 for this year. Hayne told The Star Press in July the district needs about 400 students to avoid deficit spending.

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“I really think that decisions are going to have to be made if we are below 290 (or) 300 (students),” he said at the time.

That decision was apparently to send him to China.

Hayne noted this summer that the district should have had an additional $592,736 for 2015, but an advertising mistake, and the school board’s decision not to request the maximum possible for transportation funds, left the money off the table.

“This year taxpayers saw huge savings,” Hayne said. “Who got hurt by that? We did.”

Ellis said 23 new students who enrolled in the district this year felt like an “upswing” and convinced her to vote to keep the district open for another year, despite the financial struggles.

The Union School Corporation planned to close this summer and consolidate with one of seven surrounding school corporations, but a new school board that took office in January halted those plans and replaced the superintendent.

Ellis told The Star Press any decision on next year will hinge in part on what happens in China.

“Right now we really can’t” focus on next year, she said, “because we have to see what happens with enrollment.”