School enrollment falling
Marin educators seek ways to halt student decline
In the past five years, enrollment at public schools across the state has fallen by more than 230,000 students, a trend that’s likely to continue, according to new 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. State officials predict that Santa Clara County will have the fifth largest enrollment drop in the state.
In Marin, public school enrollment fell 5% this fall compared to the same time a year ago. Enrollment declined from 35,389 students a year ago to 33,825 this year — a larger gap than in pre-pandemic times, said Mary Jane Burke, the county superintendent of schools.
“Historically, the county has been declining about 1% each year for about the past decade,” said Burke, who oversees the Marin County Office of Education.
She said the 5% drop this year might result from a various statewide factors, such as lower birth rates; people moving out of Marin to more affordable locales; or a switch to private schools because of the pandemic.
If patterns hold steady, the Department of Finance estimates there will be 542,200 fewer students in 10 years.
The trend is already having an impact in the Bay Area. In Hayward, as many as eight schools could close in the next three years. Cupertino announced last month it will close two elementary schools and consolidate another next fall. Oakland Unified narrowly avoided a number of closures earlier this year when the school board adjusted 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.
This spring, elementary school parents in the Novato Unified School District took the “save our schools” message to the streets in April, protesting a plan to close an elementary school due to declining enrollment.
District officials nixed the closure plan. But since then, they have adopted aggressive measures to arrest the enrollment decline. The measures included hiring a marketing firm, running a community engagement booth at the local farmers market and recruiting families from outside the district into Novato’s all-remote independent study program, NOVA, which was expanded during the pandemic.
“For other districts not doing independent study — as we are doing in Novato through NOVA — online learning may be a factor of losing enrollment,” Jan La Torre-Derby, superintendent of the Novato school district, said Tuesday.
In the Tamalpais Union High School District, officials approved a second teacher buyout plan last month, hoping to stave off layoffs from an expected loss of students over the next decade.
“This will be the first time in 10 years that we will have a decline in enrollment,” Corbett Elsen, the district’s chief financial officer, told the board of trustees last month. “In fact, our enrollment is projected to continue to decline over the next 10 years.”
San Rafael City Schools has since followed Novato Unified’s lead, hiring the same marketing firm, Target River, to help beef up new student enrollment and retain the students it already has.
Experts blame the statewide trend of decreasing enrollment numbers on many reasons, declining birth rates among them. Over the last decade, every county in California had a decrease in the proportion of residents under 18 as people have fewer kids than generations past, U.S. census
data show.
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.
J.R. Fruen, the policy director for the pro-housing group Cupertino for All and a former member of the school district’s commission to review closures, said 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 multi-family 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.
“You had a lot of parents, for the lack of a better term, exit the public system during the pandemic, and this was really predominantly driven by kids who were 5, 6, 7 years old,” he said. “That’s probably due to parents not wanting to have their kids do Zoom kindergarten, or they homeschooled their kids or they enrolled their kids in private schools or maybe charter schools.”
While the “initial COVID shock” might fade, Lafortune says parents might keep their kids in private or charter schools post-pandemic.
In Santa Clara County, where the drop is sharpest, Superintendent of Schools Mary Dewan said it is “difficult to pinpoint just how much impact” the pandemic has had. For the 2020-21 school year, she said enrollment countywide was down approximately 10,000 students. Almost every district had a decrease in the number of students from the year prior.
“Families left the Bay Area in search of more affordable housing and workfrom-home practices led to more migration out of the county,” she said.