It’s census season, meaning there’s a lot of attention on how many people live where right now, but population numbers and projections are always changing, even between census years. In 2018, the Association of Monterey Bay Area Governments forecast a slowdown in population growth in Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties. And that trend is beginning to appear, including in public school classrooms.
Salinas Union High School District and one of its largest feeder districts, Alisal Union, are showing signs of an enrollment decline. Both districts generate revenue from a funding formula including state funds. Those funds are dependent on average daily attendance. That means one student is the equivalent of a certain amount of state funding for a school, with the amount varying per fiscal year, based on the state’s budget.
It started slowly. Between the 2015-16 and 2017-18 school years, Alisal Union School District lost 31 students. But then from 2017-18 to 2018-19, the district lost 327 students.
“If we lose students, we lose revenue,” AUSD Interim Superintendent Jim Koenig says. “If you take into account that [AUSD] receives around $12,000 per student, and we lose approximately 500 students, that translates to $6 million less in revenue.”
Meanwhile, SUHSD was an anomaly for a long time, and defied the declining enrollment trend. “We like to think that because our students are older, they were opting to stay with some sort of family or relatives in Salinas to finish high school with us,” SUHSD Superintendent Dan Burns says. Last fall, the district even opened a new high school, Rancho San Juan High, to alleviate overcrowding.
A few years ago, consultants predicted steady growth for SUSHD. But new population projections in a recent facilities presentation project a decrease in enrollment over the next several years. It will begin with a small decrease of around 33 students beginning in 2022, and then get bigger, with a drop of 147 students anticipated in 2023, up to a drop of 369 kids in 2024.
But because of the current facilities bonds in play and the need to solve a more immediate problem of overcrowding at two SUHSD schools, Burns says planning for declining enrollment is not a priority now. “This is a conversation 10 years from now,” he says. “Ten years is a long time.”
When the time does come for those conversations, Salinas school districts may find an example nearby in Monterey Peninsula Unified School District, where enrollment has been steadily decreasing since the mass exodus of families when Fort Ord shut down 25 years ago. In the next five years, MPUSD is projected to consistently lose at least 100 children annually.
“We’re not talking about 30 or 40 kids. If it’s 100 kids every year, for five years, that is a significant impact to our resources,” Superintendent PK Diffenbaugh says.
That’s why the district launched its Vision 2025+ Task Force in August of 2019.
The task force is a committee of parents, staff, teachers and other community members. They hold workshops to inform stakeholders about the basics of what declining enrollment means for schools and what choices they have in consolidating their resources, most notably looking at possible grade restructuring options, like potentially expanding elementary schools to accommodate transitional kindergarten through grade six, rather than through grade five, as it is today. It also means the possibility of school closures in the future.
“One of the problems is our schools were built as neighborhood schools; they’re smaller,” Diffenbaugh adds.
AUSD’s elementary schools already have a K-6 model, and serve about twice as many students as the average MPUSD elementary school. At Alisal, the discussion on how to consolidate resources will center not around schools themselves, but around staffing. California’s threshold for an overcrowded classroom is 26 students to 1 teacher. In enrollment decline, for every 26 students lost, Koenig says the district would need to consider cutting a teacher to make the finances of additional support services work out.
For the Salinas Union and Alisal Union districts, it might be too early to tell what will happen – projections have been wrong before, and their level of decline is not forecast to be as consistent as MPUSD’s. The city of Salinas has plans for new developments, but even those aren’t a sure bet as far as enrollment goes; Koenig points out the Monte Bella neighborhood brought in 30 students, but a new apartment complex didn’t yield any students.
“We were looking at the size and we were planning,” he says. “[Then] we got zero kids.”
As for the cause of declining K-12 enrollment, educators can’t point to any one reason. Lower birth rates are one theory. But most education professionals agree on one thing: “It’s so expensive to live not just here, but anywhere in California,” Burns says. “This is why declining enrollment is a statewide phenomenon.”