SACRAMENTO, Calif. – On Wednesday, the California Department of Education released its report about enrollment rates for the 2024-2025 term which showed an enrollment decline of 0.54 percent compared to last cycle.
The data, available online here, shows that enrollment is still on an overall decline since the COVID-19 pandemic, but the pace of that decline has slowed compared to last documented period.
A December 2024 brief from the Public Policy Institute of California detailed that enrollment had declined at almost three-quarters of school districts statewide and enrollment declines are projected for most regions including the Central Coast.
Could this result in the closure of schools?
According to the above December 2024 brief, for school districts with enrollment losses of ten percent or more between 2009 and 2019, a third of them reduced the number of schools operated in the district.
The chart below shows the projected enrollment levels for the next decade courtesy of the Public Policy Institute of California.
Notably, that analysis was of school district before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The trend of decreasing enrollment across the state since the COVID-19 pandemic comes at the same time that there was a sharp increase in absenteeism.
"Thirty percent of California public school students were chronically absent from school in 2021-22 — a near tripling of the percentage in 2018-19," stated a 2023 report from the Public Policy Institute of California. "Although we do not know if this stark increase in chronic absenteeism, defined as missing at least 10% of the school year or at least 18 days, will continue, the data from last year raises concerns about the pace of students’ learning recovery after the educational setbacks of the COVID-19 pandemic."
California is one of just seven states that ties financial support for local school systems on attendance instead of the more common method of enrollment creating a "financial double whammy" of declining enrollment and absenteeism across golden state districts noted a CalMatters article from September of last year.
Wednesday's 2024-2025 data shows that enrollment in transitional kindergarten increased by 17.2 percent due in large part to the 85 percent increase in the number of local education agencies offering the early education program.
Transitional kindergarten programs enroll students in the first year of a two-year kindergarten program that uses a modified curriculum tailored to students entering the classroom for the first time explained the California Department of Education.
Dual Language Immersion programs also showed an increase in enrollment largely from an increase in the number of available programs.
There was a total of 1,036 dual language immersion programs statewide in the 2023-2024 data cycle, and increase of 39 percent compared to 2018-2019 when there were 747 such programs showed the latest data from the state.
In a press release about enrollment levels statewide on Wednesday, Superintendent Thurmond noted the slowing rate of enrollment decline and championed his office's focus on specific initiatives including transitional kindergarten, dual language immersion programs, and the expanding learning program.
"The overall slowing enrollment decline is encouraging and reflects the hard work of our LEAs [local education agencies] across the state," said California's Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond. "While we have more work to do, the dramatic growth in TK [transitional kindergarten] is inspiring and shows that providing rigorous and quality programs can be a key ingredient to bringing more families back to our schools. One of our initiatives in this area is expansion of Dual Language Immersion programs as a strategy to drive future enrollment growth by providing school programs that are in high demand from California’s families."
State data shows declining enrollment rate has slowed for the 2024-2025 school year News Channel 3-12.
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