Bay Area school enrollment plummets for the sixth year in a row

Enrollment at California’s public schools continued to drop for the sixth straight year, with a loss of nearly 40,000 students between this year and last. The situation was especially dire in the six-county Bay Area, with declines nearly double that of the state.

“It’s good that this drop is not as much as last year, but this is on top of two consecutive years of historic declines in enrollment,” said Heather Hough, the executive director of the Policy Analysis for California Education, a Stanford-based research center. “The fact that enrollment is continuing to decline is very concerning.”

Today, there are just over 5.8 million students at California’s K-12 public schools, according to data released by the California Department of Education on Tuesday. It’s the second year that figure has dipped below six million — a benchmark which, before 2022, the state hadn’t seen for two decades.

The decline this year was less than half of what schools saw during the 2021-22 academic year. But in the Bay Area — a region with some of the highest cost of living in the state — decreases in student population were much sharper.

Though California’s public school population dropped by just .67% from this year to last, the average number of students in Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara fell by 1.2% within the same time period, resulting in 9,727 fewer students.

Of the Bay Area counties, Santa Clara recorded the sharpest decline since the 2018-19 school year, with nearly 5,000 students leaving the county last year alone — a 2% drop from this year to last. San Mateo and Alameda had the next-highest declines, with 1.8% and 1.2% drops respectively.

After years of plummeting enrollment, experts say it’s clear that the ripple effects of the pandemic are far from over. Of the 20 largest school districts in the Bay Area, only one — Dublin Unified — recorded an increase in its student growth since before the pandemic. All other large districts saw drops between 3.7% at Mt. Diablo Unified, and 22.4% at Cupertino Union, compared with Dublin’s increase of 4%.

“(These declines) seem to be our new reality,” said Julien Lafortune, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California.

Enrollment at California public schools was dropping well before the pandemic. Some families were opting for private schools or homeschools. Others were leaving the state altogether, often driven out by the state’s high cost of living. Declining birth rates have also played a role, with data from the Public Policy Institute of California showing that in 2021, birth rates reached the lowest level in over a century.

Those trends were accelerated during COVID-19, and aggravated by school closures, remote learning, and public health concerns. In early February, a Stanford study found one-third of all missing students — those that disappeared from public school attendance records since the pandemic began — are still unaccounted for across the country.

“The pandemic exacerbated lots of issues that we already had in our schools — inequitable treatment, inequitable outcomes, staffing shortages, and attendance challenges,” said Hough. “Our schools are still under a lot of pressure, and even though it’s not necessarily the pandemic anymore, we’re still dealing with that longtail of pandemic aftereffects.”

The hardest-hit grades were eighth, tenth and second, while there was an uptick in the number of children enrolling in kindergarten, seventh and eleventh grades. Kindergarten had the highest increase in students across the state, with 25,883 new enrollments this academic year. That increase was expected by experts, who assumed parents would send their children to school once classes resumed in-person. But despite such figures, many experts were hoping for more.

“We saw a little bit of a bounce back in kindergarten this year, and a little bit last year,” said Lafortune. “But it pales in comparison to the declines that we saw two years ago.”

The implications of declining enrollment, Lafortune said, are twofold. For one, fewer students could mean splitting the state’s pot of educational funding in more equitable ways. The same amount of money could go to fewer children, he said, and as a result, additional services and resources could be provided. On the other hand, the dips in enrollment are not spread evenly across districts, and schools bearing the brunt of declines may need to confront the realities of downsizing. In places like Oakland, those decisions have been both political and difficult, with those most affected — the students — often trapped in the middle.

“If there are fewer kids and each successive cohort is getting smaller, at some point, the school will need to downsize in some way,” said Lafortune. “That’s a difficult process, and for an administrator of a school, not a fun process to be a part of.”