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California now has fewer than 6 million students attending public schools for the first time since the start of the century. According to new data from the California Department of Education, enrollment is continuing to drop at a faster rate than before the pandemic.
Cal Matters listed some key takeaways from this recently released data. One of the biggest is that statewide enrollment has dropped by over 110,000 students during the current school year. The current number of enrollment is 5,829,240. Additionally, charter school enrollment is also down for the first time since at least 2014.
Richard Barrera, a board trustee at San Diego Unified, said job losses from the pandemic forced many families to relocate and worsened the already in-decline public school enrollment. “When we opened up the schools last year, those schools had lower in-person attendance,” Barrera told Cal Matters. “It’s just more expensive for people with kids to live in California.”
Some school officials also believe mask mandates and other COVID-19 safety precautions prompted some parents to take their kids out of public school. The superintendent of the Nevada Joint Union High School District Brett McFadden told Cal Matters: “Declining enrollment cannot be fixed. I think we have to recognize that declining enrollment is part of broader demographic trends that are happening in our state.”
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