Schools close as student ranks in California fall
As the number of young people in California continues to drop, “save our schools” has become an increasingly common rallying cry among parents in communities facing the prospect of shutting some of their campuses.
In the past five years, public schools across the state have seen a drop in enrollment of more than 230,000 students, a trend that’s likely to continue, according to data from the California Department of Finance.
In the nine-county Bay Area, all counties except Contra Costa County are expected to lose students in the next decade, with state officials predicting Santa Clara County will have the fifth largest enrollment drop in the state.
The trend is already having an impact. In Hayward, as many as eight schools could close in the next three years. Cupertino last month announced it will close Regnart and Meyerholz elementary schools and consolidate Muir Elementary next fall. And Oakland Unified narrowly avoided a number of closures earlier this year when the school board opted to make adjustments to the budget instead.
The closures and consolidations follow a particularly tumultuous year of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, with some parents waiting to send their children to kindergarten or pulling them out of the public school system entirely. But now, with the prospect of some schools shutting permanently, impassioned parents have held car rallies and protests in front of schools and district offices to urge board members to reconsider.
“I feel very frustrated because of the timing,” said Meyerholz parent Yu Zhu. “Right now, it’s a pandemic and they still insist on closing the school instead of giving it one year or two years.”
Zhu said his son, who is in second grade, “feels sad” about his school shutting down and being separated from his friends. The San Jose resident will likely send his son to private school next year instead of trying another public school. The Cupertino Union School District stretches throughout Cupertino, Los Altos, San Jose, Santa Clara, Saratoga and Sunnyvale.
Meyerholz was within walking distance of the family’s home, so he figures if he has to drive to a new school, it might as well be a private school. The more than 1,200 students that attend Regnart, Meyerholz and Muir will have the option to choose from four of the district’s other elementary schools for next year.
Experts blame decreasing enrollment numbers on a multitude of reasons, including declining birth rates. Over the last decade, every county in California saw a decrease in the proportion of residents under 18 as people have fewer kids than generations past, U.S. census data shows.
Migration across the state and out of California has also been a large factor as many families struggle to afford high rents and housing costs in urban areas.
If current patterns hold steady, the state’s Department of Finance estimates that in 10 years, there will be 542,200 fewer students — more than the population of Cupertino and Hayward combined.
J.R. Fruen, the policy director for pro-housing group Cupertino for All and a former member of the school district’s commission to review closures, says that Cupertino has done “especially poorly” in building enough housing. As a result, families with young children often can’t afford to move into the city or surrounding areas and send their children to Cupertino schools.
“One of the things we haven’t produced much of is multifamily housing, which, generally speaking, tends to be less expensive to rent,” Fruen said. “In Cupertino, we’re coming off of the back end of an entire period of referenda and initiatives to try to overturn or restrict development in the city.”
Julien Lafortune, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, says demographic shifts are a factor, as well.
“Historically, Hispanic and Latino immigrants in California have tended to have slightly large family size, so larger number of children,” he said. “The next generation born here to immigrant parents converged to the native-born California birth rates fairly quickly.”
While Lafortune says that long-term patterns point to a continuing decline in enrollment, it’s unclear how much of a role the pandemic will play in accelerating the downswing. The largest decline in enrollment for the 202021 school year happened in kindergarten and sixthgrade classrooms, according to the state.