School boards and superintendents were crossing fingers that enrollment would recover quickly this year, as with the economy. That didn’t happen, but top-line enrollment data alone doesn’t yet answer big questions.
By John Fensterwald and Daniel J. WillisDashing hopes for a rebound, K-12 enrollment has fallen sharply again this year, by an additional 110,300 students, pushing total public school enrollment in California below 6 million for the first time since 1999-2000.
For Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislators, the new numbers will add urgency to decisions on how to fund schools post-Covid. Schools are funded largely by students’ average daily attendance, but drops in enrollment will affect their bottom lines and ability to meet expenses. The drop in enrollment also was not equally spread among ethnic and racial groups. Latinos, who comprise 55 percent of K-12 students, declined only 0.9 percent this year, and Asian student enrollment declined 1.9 percent, while Black enrollment dropped 3.6 percent on top of 4.5 percent last year. White enrollment fell 4.9 percent on top of 5.6 percent last year; the two-year loss of 141,000 students is more than half of the total decline in students statewide.
“I thought there might have been a bounce-back, but instead there wasn’t,” said Julien Lafortune, research fellow with the Public Policy Institute of California, who has analyzed enrollment data. The 495,327 seniors in the Class of 2022 who showed up on Census Day last fall were about 1,400 students more than when the class arrived in ninth grade. This could indicate that some students who failed to graduate in 2021 re-enrolled this year to earn their missing credits. That’s what happened in Los Angeles Unified, said Veronica Arreguin, the district’s chief strategy officer.
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