California Schools Stay Open Despite Plummeting Enrollment
With a projected budget shortfall of $95 million next year, Oakland Unified School District’s (OUSD) latest plan to close schools would trim costly overhead. The district has lost over 2,200 students since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic—six schools have lost at least 20 percent of their enrollment. But school closures are contentious, and a similar attempt failed in 2022 after an uproar led to board members being recalled.
“We need more [schools] not less,” protested a speaker at a recent board meeting. While it’s unclear why the shrinking district would need additional schools, the vocal opposition made trustees think twice before going on the record, instead punting on a vote to merge ten schools into five.
School closure battles like Oakland’s are playing out across California. Statewide, public schools lost 5.1 percent of their students between the 2019–2020 school year and the 2022–2023 school year, and the National Center for Education Statistics projects that they’ll lose another 15.7 percent by the 2031–2032 school year. Birth rates are falling, and parents are increasingly seeking alternatives to traditional public schools, such as homeschooling, private schools, and microschools.
But California’s public schools have been slow to adapt, according to new data published by Reason Foundation. The analysis examined public school closures in 15 states, including New York, Florida, and Virginia. Overall, total closures across these states dipped in the aftermath of COVID-19, but then returned to pre-pandemic levels in 2023 and 2024.
Notably, school closures in Colorado increased in 2024—exactly what you’d expect in a state that has lost 4.6 percent of its students. But this wasn’t the case in California, where closures have decreased in recent years, from 31 school closures in 2019 to only seven in 2024—even fewer than states like Utah, South Dakota, and Iowa.
One reason for this backward trajectory is that K-12 funding has been at record highs, giving public schools little incentive to adjust their size. California’s public schools got $23.4 billion in federal COVID-19 relief funds during the pandemic, while non-federal funding increased by $1,691 per student
Article from Reason.com
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