Final answer:
Without specific enrollment data for the elementary school in question, we cannot provide a precise number of kindergarten enrollees for the 2011 school year. Discussions on the importance of early childhood education and increased education expenditure provide context but not the exact figures required for answering the question.
Step-by-step explanation:
To determine how many kindergarten students, denoted as k, were enrolled at the beginning of the 2011 school year in an elementary school, it's necessary to have specific enrollment data, which is not provided directly within the context of these references. However, relevant discussions regarding the U.S. education system, including the importance of early childhood education such as pre-K programs and the expenditure per student, suggest the overall attention to the educational framework, especially in the youngest grades such as kindergarten.
The references also emphasize the fixed and growing costs of education over the years and the challenge in measuring outcomes through standardized tests. Without concrete numbers for the exact school in question, we can only hypothesize that if education spending was on the rise through 2010, the enrollment might have been stable or possibly increased due to expanded educational funding and initiatives, which would have supported the enrollment of more kindergarten students.