Coping with Declining Enrollment 

Several districts share their tactics for dealing with fewer students

Of all the challenges facing public schools, arguably none is more fundamental than declining enrollment. ADA—average daily attendance—is the lifeblood of virtually every public school district. In California, each full-time enrolled student represents more than $6,000 in annual basic funding from the state. When enrollment falls, state funding follows—and the consequence doesn’t require a class in economics: Fewer dollars means program reductions, personnel cutbacks and, perhaps, the closing of schools.

To be sure, student population fluctuations aren’t new. Most districts have, at one time or another, coped with enrollment downturns. But the declines have tended to be brief and scattered. For much of its history, California has enjoyed steady, sometimes unparalleled growth. More than 37 million people live here. The state’s population is projected to reach 44 million by 2050. One in eight Americans is a Californian.

So where are all of the children? More  than 40 percent of the state’s 977 school districts report shrinking enrollment numbers—not just small, rural districts where declining enrollment has become endemic, but also large, urban districts where growth was, until recently, a way of life.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is the largest in the state. In 2002, it boasted a peak enrollment of 746,831 students. Then the numbers began going downward, more steeply with each passing year. District demographers expect enrollment to continue to decline for at least another couple of years. The state Legislative Analyst’s Office projects that LAUSD will lose 85,000 students by the year 2012.

“We did expect to see a decline after 2003” based on declining birth rates in the region, said Valerie Edwards, chief enrollment analysis coordinator for the district. “But the decline [has been] faster and steeper than was expected. Declining births explain most of the story, but not all of it.”

The full story is complex and convoluted, not just for LAUSD but for districts in general. There are, however, three basic areas of concern:

The cost of housing

Almost everywhere in California, this is the oft-repeated lament. Most of the prime land in the state is built out. It’s getting harder to find suitable land, which means it’s getting more expensive to build on whatever land is still available. The result isn’t surprising. Housing in California is expensive. In fact, it’s cheaper overall to live in any other state in the country. The median price of a California house last year was $446,400, according to the California Association of Realtors. Prices tend to be higher in older, more established communities and neighborhoods, with the result that young families with children can’t buy in. Instead, they must live somewhere else or rent.

But there are fewer places to rent. The rising value and relative scarcity of traditional single family homes has prompted more and more apartment complex owners to convert their properties into condominiums and town homes. That may help satisfy the demands of prospective homeowners, but it means families who can afford only to rent must opt for cheaper and usually more distant locales.

Changing demographics

The leading edge of the baby boom generation, born between 1946 and 1964, is fast approaching retirement age. Most boomers have long been out of the baby business themselves, of course, but now their children are having fewer children. The state’s birth rate is down. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing if boomers were selling their homes, opening up housing opportunities in established communities for incoming younger families, but they’re not—boomers are staying put. They can’t afford to move either.

Evolving education

Several decades of real and imagined woes in public education have driven a significant number of parents to seek other educational options for their children, from home schooling to private schools to charter schools. The last option may, in time, prove to be the most influential, at least in terms of declining enrollment.

Since 1993, when the first charter schools were established in California, the numbers have grown to 575, serving more than 3 percent of California’s school-age population, according to EdSource, the research and analysis organization. In some places, the percentage is much higher. In Oakland, for example, approximately 20 percent of the city’s students attend charter schools.

School districts typically respond to declining enrollment by cutting costs—laying off teachers and other workers, instituting hiring freezes, reassigning staff, cutting pay, boosting class size, merging smaller campuses or closing schools altogether.
Sometimes districts find new sources of revenue. In Santa Cruz, for example, property owners have agreed to pay an additional $81 in taxes annually for five years to help city schools avoid program cuts necessitated by declining enrollment. In Capitola, the city council donated $160,000 to the Soquel Union Elementary School District to keep its only elementary school open. Supporters in many districts have formed local education foundations to raise funds for endangered programs.

In every district facing enrollment declines the circumstances are different, and each requires a special, localized response. But in every such district there are common themes and observations to be made as well. Here’s a look at what’s happening in three districts across the state:

• Escondido Union School District

Until three years ago, the 20,239-student Escondido Union School District, north of San Diego, enjoyed robust growth. Housing developments were springing up everywhere. Cities sprawled. Kids flooded in. Then enrollment started going downward: a decline of 600 students in 2003, 180 more in 2004, 20 in 2005.

“I can’t really say what has sparked the decline,” said Jennifer Walters, who became superintendent in July after serving five years as a deputy to Michael Caston, now retired. “Different people point to different things. It’s expensive to live in San Diego County. A lot of young families can’t afford to live in Escondido. And the city approved the conversion of five large apartment complexes into condos, which had a great impact in those neighborhoods. Those renters were essentially evicted.”

So far, the district has weathered the decline by adjusting staffing ratios and reducing expenditures where possible. “There’s a misconception that when you have fewer students, you just hire fewer teachers, but that’s simplistic. Districts have overhead. Schools still have to operate the same classrooms and programs, even if there are fewer students. You can make adjustments, but those take time,” Walters said.

Escondido officials are trying. Budget projections are conservative. The school board has put aside $3.3 million to cover some future costs. But planners predict further enrollment declines, and Walters concedes none of it will be enough if a significant downward spiral continues.

“We’ve already downsized, but if we decline again, we’ll have to start looking at severe reductions in programs and such,” she said.

• Martinez Unified School District

Located northeast of San Francisco, the Martinez school district serves a largely working-class community. The district is relatively small, enrolling less than 4,200 students. That number has been declining for several years—126 students in the 2003-04 school year, 43 in 2004-05—although that trend now appears to be flattening out.

Dan White, the district superintendent until his departure this summer, said he and the school board have responded by making the requisite program and staffing cuts. “We’re operating a pretty bare bones program now,” he said.
This year’s state budget includes a hefty cost-of-living adjustment for education, some of which can be used to offset declining enrollment costs. But White doesn’t think it will help much. “Most of the new money has already been spoken for without any talk of adding programs and increasing salaries,” he said.

If people are serious about ameliorating the effects of declining enrollment, said White, the solution isn’t merely changing how ADA is counted and assessed. Rather, it’s revamping and upgrading the fundamental system of education funding.

“It all gets down to the adequacy of that. I look at some states and districts and it’s embarrassing. They’re getting maybe twice as much in funding, and with lower costs. To me, all we’re doing in California is putting Band-Aids on the problem,” White said.

• San Juan Unified School District

Covering portions of the city of Sacramento and outlying areas, San Juan Unified is a large, mature school district with well-established neighborhoods and almost no place to grow. A few years ago, San Juan Unified enrolled more than 50,000 students, making it one of the largest districts in the state. This year, it enrolled roughly 46,000 students, said Superintendent Steven Enoch. And if projections hold true, enrollment may drop to 40,000 within the next few years—a 20 percent enrollment decline in just over a decade.

The causes in San Juan are the same as elsewhere: rising housing costs and aging demographics. The local answer has been one that educators everywhere dread: school closures. Since 2000, San Juan Unified has closed six of its 77 schools, two in 2005 alone. More closures may be in the offing.

It’s an act of last resort. “You can only do so much with the other options. You can offset some lost revenue by reducing personnel or programs, but not anywhere near 100 percent. We’ve cut teachers. We’ve cut central support. I can fit my whole cabinet [of staff advisers] in my car, and I don’t have a big car,” said Enoch.

“Eventually you get to the point of diminishing returns. After you’ve done everything else, you finally have to look at facilities. Closing a school is an emotionally draining, terribly unpleasant task, but sometimes it’s the only thing that makes financial sense. Every time we’ve looked at closing a school, we’ve looked hard at the numbers. We’ve been open and transparent with the process. People object, particularly in the affected neighborhood, but the vast majority understand what’s driving the decision.”

Despite arguments to the contrary, Enoch says closing a school saves money—not necessarily in the first year, but in the long run. And it can open up new opportunities. Three of the closed schools are now being used for other purposes, such as a special education center. Another site has been leased to a charter school. Two closed campuses are empty.

Enoch hopes the district’s steadily declining student numbers will eventually reverse. In the meantime, he’s preparing a dramatic redesign of the district, one that may ultimately include modernizing and reopening the closed campuses.

“Some of our schools are very old. We need to rebuild them. This may be a chance to create bigger and better schools that will, in time, not only protect our enrollment, but boost it in the future,” Enoch said.

• Wiseburn School District

Some districts, of course, continue to grow and prosper. In counties like Riverside and San Bernardino in southern California, student enrollment enjoys relatively broad growth because affordable housing is still being built in developments that steadily crawl eastward into the mountains and desert. This is one of the places where people come when they can’t afford to live elsewhere.

Other districts are growing—or at least not shrinking—thanks to more novel measures. One such example is the Wiseburn School District, located in the city of Hawthorne in Los Angeles County. It’s an old district, founded 110 years ago and named after a couple of local ranchers. It’s also fairly small, with 2,100 students in three elementary schools and one middle school.

Surrounded by bigger districts, Wiseburn is easy to overlook. Indeed, it has traditionally been used by neighboring districts as a sort of enrollment escape valve, said Don Brann, Wiseburn’s superintendent.

“When other districts were growing rapidly, we’d take some of their excess students. The districts were appreciative because it solved some of their space problems. They counted on us to take up kids they couldn’t house,” Brann said.

But that’s no longer the case. Most, if not all, of Wiseburn’s educational neighbors are experiencing enrollment declines. These districts want and need to keep all of the students they have. But Brann remains actively interested in attracting as many students to Wiseburn as possible—no matter where they live.

He does this by constantly visiting churches, real estate agents and new-parent groups, always touting the benefits of attending Wiseburn. His target audiences are families who have not been interested in attending their neighborhood public school or who may have kids in private school.

 “I’ve researched what Americans want in schools, and we’ve tried to create that at Wiseburn: firm discipline, good instructional materials, credentialed teachers, high test scores—all wrapped around a basic theme of a smaller learning community,” Brann said.

To make Wiseburn more practical to commuters, the district operates before- and after-school child care programs and helps arrange car-pooling. “We offer the opportunity to use the car pool lane,” Brann chuckled.

The approach has worked. One-third of the district’s students don’t live within its boundaries. Each year, Brann receives about 1,000 interdistrict transfer requests, and accepts about 750 of them. Most come from families living within 20 to 30 miles of the district, but some students commute from as far away as Lake Arrowhead—“That’s 100 miles each way,” observed Brann.

“This is how we have fought back with the problem of declining enrollment and inadequate state budgets. And it’s worked. We’ve added programs and services,” Brann continued. “But to be successful, you’ve got to have three things: plenty of space, a reason why people would want to come, and an inclusive philosophy.

“Obviously, if your program isn’t any good, then you can have all of the space in the world and nobody will be interested. So we work really hard to offer the best we can. And we work really hard to look beyond boundaries. We welcome outsiders. A lot of places don’t have that mentality. It’s all about the neighborhood. But I think you have to look globally. That’s our neighborhood.”

Looking for answers

While Brann’s approach at Wiseburn has been successful, it’s clearly not the answer everywhere. Ron Bennett, the president of School Services of California Inc., a Sacramento-based consulting and advocacy group, says the state needs to help districts more in times of declining enrollment.

“Over the years, the state has helped districts that were growing, that were exceptionally small or exceptionally large, that had a shortage of facilities or a need to modernize. Now it needs to help with declining enrollment,” Bennett declared.

Ideally, he said, aid would include easing the formula for fixing average daily attendance. Currently, schools have a one-year grace period before funding dips to reflect any numerical decline. The California Declining Enrollment Coalition—a consortium made up of CSBA, School Services and a number of districts and county education offices—has lobbied to extend that grace period to two or three years to soften the financial hit and allow districts to make orderly, well-reasoned adjustments.

“Ultimately, a district would still have to make cuts if the kids didn’t come back, but the effects would be minimized somewhat,” said CSBA Legislative Analyst Debra Brown.

The idea of extending the grace period to provide budget relief has been proposed before, without success. That was the result this year too—ironically, said Bennett, because the need was so great.

“If there were just a few school districts with declining enrollment problems, then perhaps the [state] Legislature might have considered providing help. But with almost half of the districts in the state experiencing enrollment declines, the folks in Sacramento saw that any help would cost millions of dollars,” Bennett explained.

But Bennett and others have other recommendations and advice for districts with declining enrollment problems. The first thing to do, he said, is reduce direct costs: Cut the teaching staff. Get rid of unnecessary portables. Consolidate services.

“County departments of education should broaden their services so that districts losing students don’t lose services,” said Glen Thomas, executive director of the California County Superintendents Education Services Association, because county offices may be able to provide some programs more cost-effectively than individual districts.

“If doing these things doesn’t equal revenue losses,” advised Bennett, “then look at cutting programs or making class sizes bigger. The last thing to consider is closing a school. [Sometimes] schools get closed without adequate analysis. The wrong site is picked. It’s hard to predict problems and costs after that campus is closed.”

These are reactive measures, effective but painful. Much better, according to Bennett, are efforts that attract and keep kids in school in the first place. “School district costs are determined by enrollment, but revenue is determined by attendance,” he said. “Kids missing school cost districts a lot of money. If every student came to school just one more day each year, they [would] generate 1 percent more income.”

School officials need to keep that in mind, he said. They should emphasize the importance of attendance and manage programs accordingly. For example, independent study can be encouraged, because students who contract to continue their studies while not actually attending school still count toward the district’s ADA, helping to maintain funding levels.

As long as enrollments continue to decline, CSBA, CCSESA and education advocates like Bennett will work for budgetary relief and other solutions. But the real answer most likely will have to come with time.

“I think this enrollment decline is temporary,” said Bennett. “I believe there will be more people in California in 10 years, that schools and classrooms will be needed, that growth will resume.”

Given the state’s demographic history, he’s probably right. But for many school districts, those kids can’t arrive fast enough.

Scott LaFee is a contributing writer for  California Schools.