California school districts see plummeting enrollment
Even though California is awash in money, with surprising budget surpluses and massive infusions of federal funds, school districts in the state could soon be facing a severe budget crunch.
The reason is enrollment. It’s dropping like a rock. According to numbers released by the state in May, the state’s K-12 public school districts lost 160,000 students in the 2020-21 academic year, a decline of nearly 3%. Kindergarten numbers were ominously bad, with enrollment declining by 12%. The drop in kindergarten enrollment was 20% among African American students.
Even before the pandemic, the Department of Finance was estimating that enrollment would decline by three-tenths of a percent. But of course it became far worse when classrooms were replaced by Zoom school.
Districts filed their “census day enrollment” figures for the current school year on October 6. The data will be made public next year. An even steeper drop in enrollment would not be surprising.
California ties funding to attendance, and that means school districts with empty student desks but crowded faculty lounges could be forced to start printing pink slips as soon as the 2022-23 school year.
San Francisco and Los Angeles may be most at risk. San Francisco Unified lost about 3,500 students during the pandemic. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the district anticipates a reduction in funding of $35 million next year.
Los Angeles Unified lost 27,000 students, a drop of 6%, since the 2020-21 school year. According to state estimates, Los Angeles is projected to lose 20% of its enrollment over the next decade. Statewide, the average enrollment decline is projected to be 8.7% by 2031.
Districts could avoid layoffs if the Legislature makes a last-minute change to the funding formula or extends the
“held harmless” protection that lawmakers enacted during the pandemic. That froze school funding based on the previous year’s enrollment, which meant that schools with growing enrollment, such as charters that developed innovative distance learning models, received no new funding for their new students, while schools that had lower enrollment continued to collect money for students who were no longer in class.
State lawmakers could remove average daily attendance from the formula that determines state funding, a solution that West Contra Costa Unified’s associate superintendent of business services, Tony Wold, told Edsource he supported. But others pushed back on that idea, including Angelica Jongco, deputy managing attorney for public interest law firm Public Advocates, who said the use of average daily attendance helps to hold schools accountable for the problem of absenteeism.
We agree that it would be a mistake for the Legislature to respond to both absenteeism and declining enrollment by cobbling together a budget solution that protects failing schools. State law says the money follows the student. In the upheaval of the pandemic, lawmakers protected the paychecks of teachers and school staff at district schools at the expense of charter schools and the students they served.
While the argument could be made that this was necessary on a temporary basis, it’s time to get schools back to normal.
It’s unreasonable to expect parents, students and taxpayers to stand by and watch state lawmakers send per-pupil funding to empty chairs in order to protect the jobs of school employees in empty buildings.