Student demographics are shifting so that in just six years, districts have lost nearly 2 million students nationwide. Meanwhile, charter schools gained about half a million, private schools added thousands more, and homeschooling rates remain higher than pre-pandemic levels. These shifts look different depending on where you live, but almost no district is immune. The result: Traditional district schools are serving a shrinking share of a shrinking market. 

In many states, options that used to be considered fringe alternatives are now much more accessible. Policy shifts favor charter schools and open enrollment across district lines; and education savings accounts and tax credit scholarships incentivize alternative school options. 

This means the traditional assumption that most students in a district’s boundaries will attend its schools no longer holds. It also means districts need to rethink how they can continue to successfully serve their students and communities. And it means that it is more important than ever to think about how districts and states serve students with disabilities so they don’t fall through the cracks. 

Enrollment declines create immediate pressure. Districts still have to maintain buildings, transportation systems and central office functions even as student numbers fall. Political realities often make it difficult to close under-enrolled schools. And districts must continue to meet legal obligations, especially for students with disabilities.

Over time, this leads to hard tradeoffs. Resources shift away from classrooms just to keep systems running. Meanwhile, are often the first to leave. That can concentrate marginalized students and students with disabilities in the schools with the fewest resources and the least capacity to adapt. Staffing becomes harder. Financial strain grows. Academic outcomes can suffer.

Left unchecked, this becomes a downward spiral that, in some places, ends in state intervention or financial insolvency. States will increasingly face a choice: develop a new playbook for districts or manage the consequences of decline. 

Two paths districts must pursue at the same time

For decades, districts operated as vertically integrated systems: They ran the schools, delivered the services and served nearly every student in their area.

That model no longer reflects reality. Today’s districts face two distinct but connected challenges:

First, they must compete for students by offering schools and programs that families will actively choose. That means understanding what families want and building options that respond to those preferences.

Second, they must support a broader ecosystem of public education,finding ways to serve students, families and schools beyond those they directly operate. 

Districts that succeed will do both.

Competing today isn’t about marketing existing schools more effectively. It’s about rethinking what schools look like.

Some districts are already moving in this direction. Orange County, Florida, is facing enrollment declines for the first time in decades. To meet new demands, they’re exploring screen-free microschools and other specialized programs. Elsewhere, districts have launched classical education schools modeled on approaches gaining traction in the private sector. In Houston, a district-run virtual academy now serves more than 11,000 students, helping offset losses elsewhere.

The most effective efforts share a common thread: They start with understanding what families want and build new models from the ground up.

Other cities like Denver, New York City, Indianapolis and New Orleans have expanded school options while maintaining common enrollment processes, accountability frameworks and access to services like transportation and special education.

States can accelerate this work by removing barriers. Creating more flexibility around staffing, seat-time requirements and program rules can make it easier for districts to launch microschools, hybrid programs and career pathways that reflect how families want their students to learn.

At the same time, districts can no longer afford to disengage from families who choose other options.

In many places, families are piecing together education across multiple providers: a few district classes, an online program, tutoring or homeschooling. In Florida, more than half of districts now offer classes or services to students using scholarships or education savings accounts, often on a fee-for-service basis. This keeps districts connected to students and creates new revenue streams.

But doing this well requires clearer rules. Questions about pricing, accountability and safety are often unresolved. States can help by setting expectations for part-time enrollment and unbundled services, making it easier for districts to participate while protecting students.

There’s also an opportunity to simplify choice. Many families just want an education that works; they don’t want to have to navigate a complex marketplace of options.

Even as student enrollment declines, districts will continue to control significant assets: buildings, buses, food services and specialized expertise,especially in areas like special education. 

Those assets don’t have to sit underutilized. Districts that partner with charter schools offer a template for how to use these assets in new and novel ways. In places like Miami, Indianapolis, Camden and San Antonio, charter schools have been able to lease space, opt into transportation or food service or purchase maintenance and security services. This lowers barriers for new providers, improves use of taxpayer-funded infrastructure and creates revenue streams for districts. 

Districts can also play a larger role in delivering specialized services, particularly special education. Smaller schools often lack the capacity to provide comprehensive support for students with disabilities. With the right funding and flexibility, districts can offer these services across multiple schools and providers. 

States set the conditions for success

Districts didn’t become rigid by accident. State policies that impact funding formulas, staffing rules, accountability systems have shaped the current model. Now those policies need to evolve.

States can help districts adapt by:

• Funding students, not systems, while maintaining strong accountability
  
• Removing barriers that limit innovation and flexibility, such as seat time requirements or teacher certification rules
  
• Clarifying rules for part-time enrollment and shared services
  
• Ensuring districts are compensated for serving non-enrolled students
  
• Modernizing facilities policies to support shared use
  
• Stepping in when districts cannot or will not adapt

The era of school districts as monopolies is over. But their core mission remains: ensuring every student has access to a high-quality education.

The question is not whether districts will change. It’s whether they will change fast enough, in ways that strengthen, rather than weaken, public education.

Districts that embrace both being a competitor and a connector have a path forward. With the right support from states, they can remain central, trusted institutions in a more dynamic and diverse education landscape. 

Disclosure: Travis Pillow wrote this commentary while working as the director of thought leadership and growth at Step Up For Students. He has since taken on a new role as a spokesperson for the Texas Education Freedom Accounts program at the Texas Comptroller’s Office.

Employing student influencers is the latest strategy in the Detroit school district’s ongoing efforts to grow enrollment in city schools.

District officials unveiled last week to hire 23 students to share positive messages about their schools in the Detroit Public Schools Community District. The high schoolers will create and share social media content aimed at winning over prospective students and parents, as well as engaging their peers.

The initiative is one of several new ideas the district is considering to reverse a 20-year trend of .

“Our students are at the center of everything that we do,” said Sharlonda Buckman, assistant superintendent of Family and Community Engagement, during last week’s meeting. “They have real stories, real accomplishments, real growth.”

When families hear students’ stories and see possibilities for their children, their perceptions about the district may shift, Buckman added.

have already opened. One student from each of the district’s high schools will be selected to take on the task. If approved by the board, the influencers will be assigned content and events to promote each month on rotating schedules, earning $250 each month they post.

Many factors have contributed to enrollment declines, including a shrinking, lower birthrates, , and . The district also competes with , which enroll about , as well as suburban districts that heavily recruit Detroit students.

Traditional strategies to attract students – including canvassing neighborhoods, hosting Summer on the Block events, expanding prekindergarten, focusing on reenrollment rates, and putting up billboards – have produced modest results, according to the district.

The district estimates it currently has more than 49,200 students – an increase of about 400 compared to the official count at the end of last school year.

Last summer, board members asked the district to come up with innovative, cost-efficient ways to drive enrollment more rapidly.

Board member Monique Bryant said during a July committee meeting she wanted to see students tell the stories of their own schools.

“I think we have an opportunity to use our students more, and I think we get more bang for our buck than what we’re spending now,” she said.

Students and parents would be ‘brand ambassadors’ for their schools

Overall, the district’s plan to boost enrollment is to shape the public’s perception of DPSCD to be more positive, increasing awareness of its schools with targeted advertising and connecting with more families in the city.

Marketing research supports the board’s idea to center student voices to reach those goals, district officials said.

In a survey of about 300 people conducted by the district, about 30% said they wanted to see student success stories, said Deputy Executive Marketing Director Jessica Byrd.

In addition to winning over parents, students also want to see themselves in district messaging, Byrd said. By partnering with high schoolers who are gifted at reaching peers on social media, the district will reach more potential students, she added.

“They bring their audience to our platforms, and that’s essentially what we want,” Byrd said.

The influencers will participate in monthly content creation workshops with the marketing team. They will post both on the district’s social media and their own.

DPSCD also proposes hiring 10 to 15 parent and community ambassadors to “counter negative perceptions and amplify enrollment messaging.” The presentation did not include how much the ambassadors would be paid.

The ambassadors may be people who are trusted by their communities, such as church leaders, block club presidents, and parents of students in the district. They will have monthly themes for their messaging, including safety, the district’s gains in literacy achievement, and career and technical education programs.

The district has relied on volunteer in previous years, with slightly different roles. In the past, ambassadors represented the district at community and school events.

This year, the district proposes spending nearly $42,000 on both the student influencers and the community ambassadors.

In total, the marketing plan, including other new initiatives such as web content managers, would cost around $1.4 million, according to the district’s presentation.

The district will continue its traditional enrollment campaigns, including canvassing, yard signs, and events.

Board members at last week’s meeting said they were pleased with the new plans, which would be funded in the district’s budget for the next fiscal year. The board must approve a budget by June 30.

Hannah Dellinger covers Detroit schools for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Since then, many school districts have indeed announced closures, including in the communities of and, where we live and work. More, unfortunately, are on their way.

School closure announcements can elicit the worst kind of deja vu. These feelings are well-founded. Atlanta plans to shutter schools in the south and west parts of the city, which is also where overwhelmingly live and where previous closures left several buildings vacant or underutilized for years. In Philadelphia, found that achievement gains occurred only when displaced students were moved into significantly stronger schools, while peers sent to schools of similar or lower quality did not benefit and, in some cases, saw setbacks.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Districts may have to close schools for financial or performance reasons, but they don’t need to exacerbate inequities along the way. By learning from past examples, we believe it’s possible — with thoughtful, comprehensive planning and deep and broad community engagement — for school closures to serve as a new opportunity for students, families and educators. 

The first of four steps to a more constructive, less harmful closure is about stabilization. The time between when a closure is announced and when students move out of the school can produce learning loss, staff instability and family stress. 

These in-between periods are not trivial lengths of time. Students at one Philadelphia school included in the district’s January announcement will . In other words, the students who are currently in kindergarten at this school are poised to spend their entire elementary years — through fifth-grade — in a school the district has said should close due to its low enrollment and poor facilities. 

That’s a long time, especially considering students are impacted as soon as the closure is announced. found that the largest negative achievement effect occurred between the time when the closure was announced and when students actually moved to new schools. Students in schools that were being closed had scores that were lower than expected in the year of the closure: roughly in math.

To avoid this drop-off, districts can commit to maintaining through the school’s final year. They can also help reduce staff turnover by providing early clarity on placement processes, minimizing uncertainty about job security and offering retention support. 

The second step has to do with the building itself. Again, found that neighborhoods that experienced school closures led to and lower shared sense of capacity for neighbors to act together for the common good. Schools often serve as community anchors, and closing a school can make a community feel unmoored. Countering this outcome involves smart, collaborative planning to ensure buildings are invested in, not abandoned. By this measure, Philadelphia and Atlanta are off to a positive start; their closure plans include repurposing buildings for other uses, such as in Philadelphia and in Atlanta. 

The third step is about student learning, particularly ensuring students leaving a closing school can attend a higher-quality alternative. This focus shifts the conversation from the non-academic factors that often drive closure decisions — like building utilization rates and the cost to repair aging facilities — and instead centers on student learning. Administrators must ask: Which local public schools could take in displaced students without reducing the quality of their education? 

This is not a quixotic exercise. Studies from multiple cities have when students are able to transfer to demonstrably stronger schools with higher achievement levels, more experienced teachers, richer course offerings and better facilities. 

The fourth and final step is about the schools receiving new students. Especially with the months and, in many cases, years between when a closure is announced and when it takes place, there is no reason receiving schools should be caught flat-footed. These schools should have both academic and social-emotional support available for students, and districts should cap how many new students each school receives. The odds of giving individuals the support they need decrease with each additional student an institution takes in.

What we are calling for is a paradigm shift. District leaders need to begin shifting from announcing “we’ve decided to close schools” to “we’ve decided to close schools and for preventing harm and maximizing student opportunity at every stage.”

District leaders in Atlanta, Philadelphia, and elsewhere deserve credit for recognizing the trends and taking action. What’s important for these and other leaders to recognize, however, is that their work is just beginning. 

Layfolk may interpret reports of declining enrollment in public schools as a sign of a failing system being rejected by families, but education leaders say the reality is there are simply fewer children to enroll.

In 2020, Nevada’s public school enrollment — encompassing both traditional school districts and charter schools — sat at around 480,000. Now, enrollment is expected to be around 455,000 by the end of the current school year, according to State Superintendent Victor Wakefield.

That’s a drop of nearly 30,000 students over 5 years.

Wakefield told lawmakers during an interim legislative committee hearing last week that Nevada’s declining birth rate and migration trends are the primary drivers of that trend. However, some school districts appear to see charter schools as the more immediate threat to their enrollment.

While Nevada’s overall population continues to grow, that growth is driven by retirees and people without children.

At the same time, Nevada’s birth rate between 2011 and 2023, according to Pew. That was one of the largest declines in the nation — 4th of the 51 states and DC — and significantly higher than the national average decline of 10.6%.

The result is that, even with a still-rising overall population, graduating high school classes across the state are bigger than incoming kindergarten cohorts. Current graduating seniors are among the last of the larger “pre-recession” babies before 2008.

It’s a national trend education policymakers refer to as an “enrollment cliff.”

The Nevada Association of School Superintendents surveyed its district leaders about their declining enrollment: 9 of 16 selected birth rate as having the largest negative impact on their enrollment, four selected charter schools, and two selected “housing and migration.”

Carson City School District Superintendent A.J. Feuling told state lawmakers last week that his district’s highest grade levels are all around 600 students. That 600 figure was once something the district could rely on.

“Our last three kindergarten classes, I think, were 434, 410, and 425″ students, he said. “We just have these larger classes falling off and smaller classes coming in.”

Fueling pointed to housing costs as a major contributor.

“Just here in Carson City I think the median home value is $525,000,” he said. “I just don’t know how any young, working class family can move into Carson City. And I know that’s not unique to Carson City.”

Wakefield concurred, adding that housing costs are also contributing to some younger families relocating out of state.

While private school enrollment did during the covid pandemic, it is not a significant driver of declining public school enrollment. Private school enrollment increased by around 3,100 students between 2019 and 2024, according to the state’s most recent report.

To what extent homeschool is growing and impacting the public school system is unclear to education leaders. Homeschooled students aren’t tracked by the state.

Wakefield told lawmakers homeschooling families are required to inform their local school district once but there is no follow-up to see if those families ever adjust course or move.

“There is not robust data,” he said.

Fueling said that superintendents have anecdotally reported receiving more of those “notice of intent to homeschool” forms during covid and post-covid years than they did pre-pandemic. But that’s the extent of what he knows.

“It’s, like, poof, and they’re gone,” he said. “They never have to report back to us.”

Wakefield said collecting more data on homeschool students would require “a policy change” at the state level.

Regardless of the causes, the end result is the same for school districts and their schools: Less money.

Assemblymember Selena La Rue Hatch, a Democrat from Reno, said one misconception she’s heard is that having fewer students means each school district will have more to spend on the students they do have. But that isn’t how education funding works in the state.

The state funds districts and schools on a per pupil basis, so declines in enrollment mean declines in funding.

In response to declining enrollment, are responding by “right-sizing” their classes and facilities, according to Wakefield and NDE State Education Funding Manager Melissa Willis.

That means reducing personnel, consolidating services or reducing spending where they can. It can be a challenge, added Wakefield, because of fixed costs like facilities, transportation, staffing and maintenance.

Wakefield told lawmakers they should focus on ways to make budgeting predictable and sustainable for districts as they adjust to changing enrollment patterns. He pointed to the Nevada Commission on School Funding as a valuable resource for specific policy recommendations for the 2027 Legislative Session.

That commission is expected to present to state lawmakers in a future meeting of the interim education committee.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: info@nevadacurrent.com.

That might sound like the premise of an episode of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. But something very similar is happening right now in California’s public schools. Worse still, there’s no celebrity chef coming to clean up the mess. 

Even though public school enrollment has fallen sharply since the pandemic, most California districts have continued adding staff. Now teachers unions are pressing districts to commit to more expensive labor contracts, even as the funding they receive remains tied to the number of students they serve.

Earlier this month, teachers in two Sacramento-area school districts the job after contract negotiations stalled, bringing the number of teacher strikes in California to six this school year. And more may be on the way. Unions in Los Angeles and Berkeley have already authorized strikes if negotiations fail.

These strikes are not isolated incidents. They are part of a coordinated statewide pressure by the California Teachers Association (CTA) called “We Can’t Wait,” involving 32 districts that educate about 1 million of the state’s students. As the San Francisco Chronicle recently , the campaign has emboldened local unions to dig their heels in and make contract demands that go beyond what independent state panels have recommended.

How did we get here? 

From the perspective of union leaders, the answer is simple: California’s schools are understaffed and educators are underpaid. “We have a staffing crisis, and it’s worst in areas where teachers are needed the most,” Kyle Weinberg of the San Diego Education Association . “If we want to fully staff our schools, we need a living wage.” Striking a similar tone, Kampala Taiz-Rancifer of the Oakland Education Association : “Our students deserve smaller class sizes that allow them to thrive and feel safe at school.”

These local leaders are echoed by their counterparts in state headquarters. “There is no district anywhere in the state that is getting what they deserve from the state’s funding system,” CTA President David Goldberg the Sacramento Bee. “It is a system that has gone on for decades and basically balanced budgets on the backs of our students and educators.”

But research produced by a union-friendly organization complicates that claim. A recent school finance from the Albert Shanker Institute finds that California devotes 3.4 percent of its economic capacity to K–12 schools, compared with a national average of 3.1 percent. In other words, California already commits 10% more of its economic capacity to public education than the typical U.S. state.

Many union leaders say that California districts have prioritized administrative spending over investing in teachers and classroom support staff. Yet in Twin Rivers Unified School District, where teachers are currently on strike, the data point in the opposite direction. Combining figures by district officials with on teacher contracts shows that starting teacher pay in the Sacramento-area district has increased about 35% since 2019, rising from $48,168 to $65,228—roughly equal to the household income there. 

Meanwhile, NCES data by Marguerite Roza’s Edunomics Lab shows that administrative and central office staffing in Twin Rivers has been slashed while the number of teachers and paraprofessionals has grown, even as enrollment has fallen.

The slogan “We Can’t Wait” also carries an unintended irony for parents and students. Research has consistently that districts that relied more heavily on remote instruction during the pandemic experienced larger post-pandemic enrollment declines as parents sought alternatives when schools failed to reopen.

According to my own analysis of AEI’s Return 2 Learn , the 32 districts participating in the CTA campaign spent nearly 80% of the 2020–21 school year in fully virtual learning, while the rest of California’s districts were remote for closer to half that school year. Twenty-one of the 32 districts never reopened for a continuous week of fully in-person learning that year.

Many families apparently voted with their feet. Since the pandemic, NCES data shows that the 32 districts participating in CTA’s campaign experienced average enrollment declines of about 8%. Comparing these districts to their neighbors within the same counties — a fairer apples-to-apples comparison — enrollment in “We Can’t Wait” districts fell about 3 percentage points more than in nearby districts that are not part of the campaign.

In other words, the union locals striking — or threatening to strike — are concentrated in districts that have lost a larger share of their students since the pandemic and are therefore more vulnerable to structural deficits.

State policymakers haven’t helped. California expanded “” that allowed districts to be funded based on prior-year attendance rather than the number of students actually showing up. Because those protections were strengthened during the pandemic, the fiscal impact of enrollment losses did not fully hit district budgets until around 2024,especially after federal ESSER funding expired. In effect, districts were being paid based on yesterday’s students rather than today’s. It was like a restaurant paying this year’s servers with last year’s reservations.

Which brings me back to the slogan “We Can’t Wait.” During the pandemic, students and families were the ones told to wait: for classrooms to reopen, for normal schooling to resume, for the adults in charge to figure things out. Families were told to be patient, even as many quietly began leaving the system.

Now many of the same union locals that kept students waiting the longest are warning of a five-alarm fire. But emergencies caused by earlier choices have a different name.

They’re what happens when the customers leave and the bill finally comes due.

As Marguerite Roza recently predicted, “To balance [their] budget, districts will issue pink slips, cut some electives, Advanced Placement classes and sports, eliminate supports for high-needs children, freeze hiring and close schools.” Unfortunately, that prediction is already coming true. Across California, districts have issued thousands of preliminary layoff notices as they scramble to close widening budget deficits.

We can’t wait any longer. That’s just the math.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is weighing layoffs that could reshape classrooms across the nation’s second-largest school district. 

The district’s board at next week’s meeting is expected to decide whether to cut jobs, as it faces a projected $191 million deficit in the 2027-28 school year if it keeps spending at its current pace. The deficits in LAUSD and other districts are driven largely by the loss of Covid relief funds, declining enrollment and rising costs.

Meanwhile, labor unions throughout the state are pushing many districts for pay raises and other changes, such as increased health care contributions in their next contracts.

“Where you need to cut then is the classroom,” he said. “Because you need fewer classrooms, you need fewer teachers, fewer aides, fewer of folks that are at the sites directly serving kids.”

Los Angeles Unified is not alone among California’s school districts facing financial pressures. The  must close a deficit or face state receivership.  plans to implement job cuts to address its budget shortfall. 

“Large and small districts, urban, suburban and rural alike, are experiencing similar constraints,” reads an open  from superintendents of eight California districts, demanding the state restructure the way it funds schools. “When nearly every school system in California is facing the same challenges, it is clear that the issue is not isolated decision-making, but the sustainability of the funding model itself.” 

The superintendents who sent the letter, including LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, cited ongoing challenges, such as enrollment declines.

LAUSD’s enrollment declined more than 3% to 389,000, down from roughly 402,500 between the 2024-25 and 2025-26 academic years. That outpaced both the state and country, according to a at January’s Committee of the Whole meeting. 

About 90% of LAUSD’s budget is spent on personnel. Fine said that with so much of the money being spent on staffing, it would be nearly impossible to balance the budget on the remaining funds. 

“Our priority will be to protect students, protect programs, protect schools, and, to the extent possible, protect workforce,” Carvalho said at a Roundtable discussion with reporters in late January. “And within that priority, the protection of workforce begins with school sites. That is the balance that we want to establish, leading to the necessary fiscal solvency that we must continue to observe.” 

If LAUSD moves forward with job cuts, laid-off employees would be notified by March 15, per state law.

Weighing in the potential cuts, LAUSD is expecting a $191 million deficit for the 2027-28 academic year, though several factors are at play, including the final governor’s budget. The district also said it plans to move forward with roughly $150 million in reductions to its central office. 

The current fiscal challenges come after two years of diminishing reserves to help replenish a multi-billion-dollar deficit. While the district teacher’s union has pointed to $5 billion in reserves as of July, LAUSD is expecting to burn through it in three years. 

“The danger in just trimming 5% here, 10% there is it leaves you sometimes with incomplete programs,” Fine said. “It may leave you with the inability to actually turn things into practice.” 

The school board was originally expected to vote on the layoffs Tuesday, but postponed its regular meeting to Feb. 17 to allow for better preparation and engagement. The meeting’s comes after LAUSD unions issued a  asking that the vote be delayed and presented instead at a stand-alone meeting. 

Ongoing labor actions 

The discussion of layoffs comes as United Teachers Los Angeles, or UTLA, the union representing roughly 35,000 teachers,  a strike if a labor agreement isn’t reached. Meanwhile, SEIU Local 99, which represents roughly 30,000 workers, including special education assistants, cafeteria workers and custodians, is in the midst of a strike authorization vote. 

Before mediation began with UTLA in January, LAUSD said its bargaining proposals would cost $4 billion over a three-year contract, while SEIU Local 99’s would cost $3 billion through 2027-2028. 

LAUSD’s most recent  to SEIU Local 99 would increase wages by 13% over the next three years — starting with a 10% increase this year. Before mediation, the district offered UTLA a 4.5% raise and 1% bonus over two years. 

UTLA says that isn’t enough. With Los Angeles’ high cost of living, teachers are struggling financially, the union says. A showed that money is particularly important for Gen Z Black and Latino teachers in the district; a quarter of whom said they would leave their careers in education in search of a higher-paying job.

“I’m a third-year teacher. I have a master’s degree from UCLA, which is the premier education school in the country, and I’m still living paycheck to paycheck. And I’m still unable to even think about one day owning a home,” said Jon Paul Arciniega, a 29-year-old social studies teacher at Edward R. Roybal Learning Center in the Westlake area.  

“I still live at home,” Arciniega said. “And if I want to think about things like getting my own place, starting a family, buying a home, right now, all of that seems untenable.” 

Uncertainty ahead 

Sandy Meredith, a psychiatric social worker covering 42 district schools, said she hopes a strike won’t be necessary, both because of the financial strain it would place on colleagues like Arciniega and because schools play a critical role in students’ daily safety. 

But at the same time, she said they’re struggling to support students — 20% of whom require mental health services — without the district providing the support and wages they see as critical to their success. She expressed frustration with the size of the district’s reserves, particularly when teachers and staff like her pay out of pocket to provide basic resources, such as toilet paper, for students. 

“I feel like I’m on an airplane,” she said, “and I’ve been told ‘I’m sorry, but we can’t give you a mask to put on first. But go ahead and take care of the child.’ ” 

Strikes are nothing new in Los Angeles Unified. UTLA last went on strike in 2019, leading to a historic  with 6% pay raises, smaller class sizes and investments in community schools. Four years later, in 2023, SEIU Local 99 went on strike, which resulted in a 30% wage increase. 

But teachers and staff say this year comes with much higher stakes. 

Members of UTLA’s leadership say educators and school staff play a bigger role beyond the school walls.  

“We’re dealing with families’ anxieties. Are they not being able to come to school because of their housing insecurity? Is there trauma with this addition of the ICE raids? There’s concerns about safety,” said Margaret Wirth, a pupil services and attendance counselor who supports all of LAUSD’s Region South. “Is my child safe? For the child, is my parent safe? There’s a lot of different factors that make everything more heightened.”

Pupil service and attendance counselors like Wirth help reduce chronic absenteeism. She said layoffs will mean her caseloads will increase. 

But at the same time, Fine said if a district is going to move forward with layoffs, the earlier, the better.  

“The earlier you cut, the better off you are, and you’re also not dangling this black cloud over your staff and the community,” Fine said. “You get the discussion done, you forecast your gap right, and you make a decision on how to close that gap all at once, and everybody knows what the plan is.” 

This was originally published on .

The head of the Philadelphia City Council Education Committee says he disagrees with parts of , kicking off what may become a fraught conflict over which schools are ultimately shuttered.

The district said Thursday that nearly 5,000 students will have their schools closed in the coming years. Along with closures, the plan includes co-locating and relocating several schools and modernizing some school buildings, shuffling where many students go to school across the city.

But Councilmember Isaiah Thomas said he would “never support” closing one of the schools on the district’s list — Conwell Middle School — and has major questions about the district’s plan for several others.

Other officials urged the district to be transparent with schools and make sure students and families are supported. A spokesperson for Mayor Cherelle Parker said she was not available to comment. And union leaders said they needed more time and more information to determine whether or not they support it.

The reactions that began to trickle out Thursday will set the stage for what will likely become months of tense discussions and negotiations over what could be a jarring transformation for Philadelphia schools. District leaders say the plan would improve academics and use resources more efficiently and .

Members of the Board of Education, who were nominated by Parker, will review the plan at next month’s board meeting. The plan must be approved by the board, although Thomas and other city officials could use their political influence to complicate the plan’s path forward, or change it.

Though school leaders have said for months that closures were coming, the timing of the news still shocked many educators and families. Whispers of a list of schools the district plans to close began to spread Tuesday and Wednesday. Meetings and protests about the plan are likely to happen early and often.

Outside of Motivation High School in West Philadelphia Thursday afternoon, students said they had learned their school was closing during a meeting in the school’s auditorium earlier in the day.

“I pray it doesn’t happen,” said Journee Tucker, 16.

The district wants Motivation to merge into Bartram High School as an honors program beginning in the 2027-28 school year. The Motivation building is slated to be repurposed as district swing space.

But Tucker said she worried that Bartram is “too chaotic.” This year, it has nearly 600 students enrolled — four times the size of Motivation.

If the plan goes through, she said her mom has already said she would attend a different high school than Bartram.

“It’s going to be a mess,” Tucker said. “I just don’t see the point.”

Councilmember wants to protect Conwell Middle School from closure

Thomas’ reaction stood out Thursday, in part because several elected officials did not say if they were for or against the plan, or comment on specifics. Others weren’t available for comment.

Thomas is an influential voice in the city’s education system, and has been a proponent of several charter schools.

Thomas said he immediately disagreed with parts of the plan — especially the district’s plan to close Russell Conwell Middle School, which he attended.

“If you’re a Philly person, you understand,” he said, adding that the school’s strong alumni network and culture is a huge benefit to the community.

The school, which is in a 100-year-old building in the city’s Kensington neighborhood, is one of several middle schools the district plans to close.

Thomas said he also disagreed with the district’s plan to merge students from Parkway Northwest High School into Martin Luther King High School, and turn Parkway Northwest into an honors program in the school.

Thomas said he also did not understand how the district expects to expand Ellwood from a K-5 school to a K-8 school while the school is already nearing capacity.

“I’m not looking to completely blow anything up or anything like that,” Thomas said of the plan. “There are some things that I agree with, there are some things I have a few more questions about, and then there are a few things that I disagree with.”

Union leadership says school closures would be ‘devastating’

District leadership has said no teachers will lose their jobs as a result of the closures, and teachers at schools that close will help fill vacancies elsewhere.

Still, Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Arthur Steinberg said Thursday the news has been “devastating and disheartening” for staff.

Steinberg said he could not comment on whether he supported the plan until the district shares more information on how they arrived at their decision. During community engagement events last year, . But it did not explain how those factors would influence decisions.

“It’s like they took all these ingredients, threw them into a blender, and came out with a finished product,” Steinberg said.

Ultimately, Steinberg said he is never an advocate for closing a school. But he said he understood that the district has had years of “chronic disinvestment” and needs to address its .

Robin Cooper, president of the Commonwealth Association of School Administrators which represents principals and other school staff, said she appreciated the district’s efforts to survey staff and families for feedback about facilities before announcing the plan.

But she said she still worries closures will be problematic for school communities and create uncertainty for many school staff.

“I understand the superintendent has a job to do, and I don’t think that he did it lightly,” Cooper said. “I just think it’s a no-good situation all the way around.”

Families, teachers worry school closures will be damaging

In West Philadelphia, Rhemar Pouncey is worried about what will happen to her grandson if Overbrook Elementary School closes.

In the district’s proposal, Overbrook students will be reassigned to four other neighborhood schools, and the building will be repurposed as district network offices.

Pouncey called the school “a family and a community in itself,” referencing staff who know students by name, as well as food and gift drives organized by the neighbors.

“I do not concern myself with sending my grandson to Overbrook Elementary, because I know he’ll be safe,” Pouncey said. “I know when he gets dropped off that he has an extended group of aunties and uncles.”

The district has said it will create a transportation plan for students whose schools change, but has not released more details.

Pouncey said she worries about her son walking through “danger zones” in the neighborhood to get to another school.

About two dozen schools have a that hires adults to patrol school perimeters and sometimes walk children home after school. Separately the City of Philadelphia runs a to escort students before and after the school day.

“What’s going to happen if one of our kids gets shot or gets killed because you close down the closest school to them, for them to have to go all the way to John Barry, or all the way to Bluford?” Pouncey said.

Several teachers said the district had forbidden them from talking to the press about the plan.

One teacher at Lankenau Environmental Science High School, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, said the entire school was taken aback to hear the school would be closed and turned into a magnet program at Roxborough High School.

Much of the school’s programming, she said, relies on its location. It organizes a beekeeping and honey collection event with a community partner, for example, that can only happen at the site. And it has other programming connected to a neighboring environmental education center.

“If you’re just talking about buildings, and you’re looking at children as numbers, then, yeah, this is what you do,” the teacher said. “But when you look at the actual educational programming and closing a site like Lankenau, it doesn’t work. You won’t be able to pick the program up and put it into Roxborough.”

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The schools have mostly reopened after prolonged closures, using temporary classrooms. But the fires, which killed dozens and left thousands homeless, have chopped enrollment by half at some of the affected schools.

“Families went with schools that weren’t impacted by the fires,” said Bonnie Brimecombe, principal of Odyssey Charter-South, which was destroyed in the Eaton blaze. “And then we have other people that are just nervous about coming back [because] it’s a lot to see and be a part of.”

Odyssey South, located in the Altadena area of Los Angeles, reopened on three temporary campuses from January to June of last year including a Boys and Girls Club, an office in Old Town Pasadena, and classrooms at the nearby ArtCenter College of Design.

By fall, the main campus reopened in a school building that was formerly used by another charter, but many families chose other schools or left the area, with enrollment falling to 183 from 375. 

Despite the trauma, students were resilient, improving test scores and good classroom behavior, said Brimecombe. 

“It’s just a complete surprise at how well the kids have gone through this process,” she  said. “The kids are happy, the kids are smiling, they are learning, they are fine. The kids are happy, happy to be back together.”

Still, enrollment challenges persist, and the school has had to let go of a handful of teachers and teaching assistants. The school’s original building felt more like home, Brimecombe said, but kids who have stayed at the school are thriving.

Odyssey South has put new supports in place for students’ including an on-site counseling team that was expanded this year to increase access for students.

The school also brought in art therapists to run a series of sessions with different grade levels, and a counseling team that visits classrooms for structured sessions on topics that surface for specific age groups.

Teachers have also increased the number of field trips at the school to give students “happy situations” and positive experiences away from the fire-affected environment, Brimecombe said.

Odyssey South was able to maintain its previous levels of programming this year but may have to make cuts next year if current funding levels don’t persist, Brimecombe said.

That’s largely a matter of enrollment, since Odyssey South, like other public schools in LA., receives its funding on a per-pupil basis. With half of the school’s students gone, the future is uncertain.

Still, the principal is hopeful.

“Families are coming back,” Brimecombe said. “They’re just not back yet.”Enrollment problems also persist in the Palisades, where three schools were burned, said LAUSD school board member Nick Melvoin, who represents the area.

Palisades Charter High is holding up the best, with about 2,500 students, down from about 2,900 pre-fire. Marquez Elementary has about 130 students, a little less than half of pre-fire enrollment. Palisades Elementary has about 300 students, down by about 100 from pre-fire levels.

Students returned to Marquez Elementary into portable, temporary buildings in the fall. Palisades High students are returning to their school building on Jan. 27, and Palisades Elementary students continue to attend school at their co-location site at Brentwood Science Magnet.

New, rebuilt facilities for all three schools should be completed by fall 2028, “but all three schools are kind of a slightly different journey from now until then,” said Melvoin.

“The families that have been displaced, that are in other parts of L.A. and the country, are either coming back eventually or not,” he said of enrollment drops. “Some families who were not satisfied with the co-located option or didn’t want to be back in the Palisades just yet because of environmental concerns, are still in other schools.”

The district is giving flexibility in where families choose to enroll, said Melvoin, who expects enrollment in the displaced schools to improve.

“We’re going to have some new enrollment for the coming months, as people realize like, ‘Oh, I’m moving back to my house,’ or ‘my insurance money ran out, and so now I’m back in the Palisades,’ and there’s only a few schools that are open,” said Melvoin.

Besides environmental concerns, Melvoin said, families that are staying away due to a lack of infrastructure in the fire-scorched area, and because of trauma.

“The burn scar is still there,” he said. “You’re still driving past a number of destroyed buildings and houses. There are just some families who aren’t ready to put their kids back there yet.”

Many families are hopeful because schools are returning, construction is visible, and some businesses are coming back, said Allison Holdorff Polhill, a district director who works in Melvoin’s office and longtime Palisades resident who lost her home in the fires.

Virtually all residents were under‑insured, and there is still a strong need for federal money, grants and loans to cover rebuilding gaps, said Holdorff Polhill, and people are frustrated by slow government planning and being scattered in rentals or forced into assisted living.

“Every single friend’s home burned to the ground,” said Holdorff Polhill. “People are still traumatized by what happened.”

LAUSD has set aside $604 million for the full rebuilding of the impacted areas in the Palisades, including the three burned schools, LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said.

The money will provide for the full rebuilding of Marquez Elementary, which was destroyed, plus new buildings and improvements to existing ones at Palisades Elementary, where about 60% of the campus was burned.

At Palisades High, about 30% of classrooms were destroyed and the remainder are being rebuilt. 

The school is famous for being a popular filming location for Hollywood movies such as Carrie, Freaky Friday, and Teen Wolf, and for notable alumni including J.J. Abrams and will.i.am.

Pali High students have been attending classes in a former Sears department store building while construction is underway to repair fire damage. 

The school’s campus is scheduled for reopening when work is completed later this month. 

Carvalho said the district is still working to recover about $500 million of the expected construction costs from insurance companies.

“The rest we will seek FEMA reimbursements, which we believe we are absolutely legally entitled to,” Carvalho said. “We hope that the federal government will not play games, political games as we seek these reimbursements.”

In addition to these investments, the district will spend in excess of a billion dollars, all funded through Measure US, a $9 billion bond referendum approved by voters in 2024, to build higher levels of fire resilience at schools across the district.

“That means anything from replacement of filtration systems, the acquisition of air purifiers, new filtration systems for schools, HVAC systems, and replacement of roofing structures and windows with materials that withstand fires,” Carvalho said.  

LAUSD has installed more than 230 air quality sensors on school buildings, covering every campus in the district, Carvalho said.

The sensors detect nauseous fumes, particulate matter in the air, and also measure temperature and wind speed, enabling school officials to make emergency decisions in case of fires, he said.

“Prevention is the best solution for fires,” said Carvalho. 

This story was originally published by . for their newsletters.

For years, California schools have pushed to change the way the state pays for K-12 education: by basing funding on enrollment, instead of attendance. That’s the way 45 other states do it, and it would mean an extra $6 billion annually in school coffers.

But such a move might cause more harm than good in the long run, because linking funding to enrollment means schools have little incentive to lure students to class every day, released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office. Without that incentive, attendance would drop, and students would suffer.

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If the Legislature wants to boost school funding, analysts argued, it should use the existing attendance-based model and funnel more money to schools with high numbers of low-income students, students in foster care and English learners.

When it comes to attendance, money talks, the report noted. For more than a century, California has funded schools based on average daily attendance – how many students show up every day. In the 1980s and ’90s, the state started to look at alternatives. A pilot study from that time period showed that attendance at high schools rose 5.4% and attendance at elementary schools rose 3.1% when those schools had a financial incentive to boost attendance.

This is not the time to ease up on attendance matters, the report said. Although attendance has improved somewhat since campuses closed during the pandemic, it remains pre-COVID-19 levels. In 2019, nearly 96% of students showed up to school every day. The number dropped to about 90% during COVID-19, when most schools switched to remote learning, but still remains about 2 percentage points below its previous high.

Attendance is tied to a host of student success measurements. Students with strong attendance tend to have higher test scores, higher levels of reading proficiency and higher graduation rates.

“It’s a thoughtful analysis that weighs the pros and cons,” said Hedy Chang, president of the nonprofit research and advocacy organization Attendance Works. “For some districts there might be benefits to a funding switch, but it also helps when districts have a concrete incentive for encouraging kids to show up.”

True cost of educating kids

Schools have long asked the Legislature to change the funding formula, which they say doesn’t cover the actual costs of educating students, especially those with high needs. The issue came up repeatedly at a recent conference of the California School Boards Association, and there’s been at least one recent bill that addressed the issue.

The , by former , a Democrat from the La Cañada Flintridge area, initially called for a change to the funding formula, but the final version merely asked the Legislative Analyst’s Office to study the issue. The bill passed in 2024.

A 2022 report by Policy Analysis for California Education also noted the risks of removing schools’ to prioritize attendance. But it also said that increasing school funding overall would give districts more stability.

Enrollment is a better funding metric because schools have to plan for the number of students who sign up, not the number who show up, said Troy Flint, spokesman for the California School Boards Association.

He also noted that schools with higher rates of absenteeism also tend to have higher numbers of students who need extra help, such as English learners, migrant students and low-income students. Tying funding to daily attendance — which in some districts is as low as 60% — brings less money to those schools, ultimately hurting the students who need the most assistance, he said.

“It just compounds the problem, creating a vicious cycle,” Flint said.

To really boost attendance, schools need extra funding to serve those students.

Switching to an enrollment-based funding model would increase K-12 funding by more than $6 billion, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. Currently, schools receive about $15,000 annually per student through the state’s main funding mechanism, the Local Control Funding Formula, with an additional $7,000 coming from the federal government, block grants, lottery money, special education funds and other sources. Overall, California on schools last year, according to the Legislative Analyst.

Motivated by money?

Flint’s group also questioned whether schools are solely motivated by money to entice students to class.

“Most people in education desperately want kids in class every day,” Flint said. “These are some of the most dedicated, motivated people I’ve met, and they care greatly about students’ welfare.”

Josh Schultz, superintendent of the Napa County Office of Education, agreed. Napa schools that are funded through attendance actually have lower attendance than schools that are considered “basic aid,” and funded through local property taxes. Both types of schools have high numbers of English learners and migrant students.

“I can understand the logic (of the LAO’s assertion) but I don’t know if it bears out in reality, at least here,” Schultz said. “Both kinds of schools see great value in having kids show up to school every day.”

This article was and was republished under the license.

The article, , draws on state and national data to measure changes in student enrollment over the last half-decade. Both in Massachusetts and around the country, white and Asian parents were far likelier to pull their children out of public schools than Hispanics and African Americans. Kindergarten and middle school enrollment plunged, while elementary schools actually saw a small bump in total students.

Joshua Goodman, an economist at Boston University and one of the study’s authors, said the uncertainty of the COVID era has given way to a new equilibrium for the 2020s: The families of the highest-performing K–12 students, and those with access to greater resources, increasingly disaffiliate from traditional public schools.

“The question that worries me is whether this means that public schools have now cemented a reputation as not being the place where high-achieving students attend,” Goodman said. “If you’re a family that’s looking for a challenging curriculum, and you have a talented student, you’re no longer seeing public schools in quite that light.”

The number of pupils filling seats in all Massachusetts schools, public or private, was lower in fall 2024 than five years before. But that erosion, driven in part by broader changes to the state’s demographics, is less striking than the changes going on beneath the surface. 

Enrollment at private schools shrank by just 0.7 percent during that period, much less than the 16.3 percent decline that was predicted by years of falling head counts leading up to the pandemic. By contrast, traditional public schools saw a drop of 4.2 percent, nearly double the projected reduction over the first half of the 2020s. 

Various racial and ethnic subgroups also exhibited radically different behavior. At the beginning of the last school year, enrollment in Massachusetts public schools was much lower for white and especially Asian students (-3.1 percent and -8.1 percent percent, respectively) than was presaged by trends running through the 2010s. Black and Hispanic enrollment, however, actually climbed upward compared with the same projections. Goodman and his co-author, BU doctoral student Abigail Francis, found similar patterns in data collected from around the United States, though those figures run only through 2023.

Perhaps the most jarring divergence arose along class lines. In the state’s most affluent 20 percent of school districts, as defined by their share of students qualifying for free lunch, K–12 student rolls fell by 5.7 percent; everywhere else, the slide amounted to just 1 percent. In all, that slice of the richest communities lost about 150 percent as many pupils as the bottom 80 percent.

Those findings offer a suggestive update to those of earlier studies. One, , showed that white, Asian, and higher-income families in Michigan were the least likely to return to their local public schools in the second year after school closures began. Among them, four-fifths of students who moved to private schools in 2020 stayed there the following year. 

In examining student flows in the initial years of the pandemic, University of Michigan economist Brian Jacob found that white families removed their children from public schools at much higher rates in districts that were slow to reopen for in-person instruction. Jacob said in an interview that he was “not surprised” to see that parents who had found private alternatives hadn’t yet switched back.

“There was evidence that more affluent families were shifting kids away from public schools during COVID because they wanted more in-person instruction,” he observed. “It may be that schools are going to have to work a lot harder to win back some of the families they lost.” 

Even today, with COVID quarantines and Zoom classrooms long in the past, Americans’ feelings about public schools are notably cool by historic standards. In a Gallup survey released in February, 73 percent of U.S. adults expressed dissatisfaction with the state of public education, up from 57 percent in 2001. 

Parents, directly invested in their local schools and regularly exposed to their children’s teachers, are more sanguine about the issue than other respondents. But they to say that K–12 education is headed in the wrong direction than in years past. 

Martin West, Education Next’s editor in chief and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said the “exit of quality-conscious families” — particularly those with the means to afford private school tuition — provides a real-time picture of how perspectives of local schools are changing, even in a state with comparatively impressive academic results. 

“We have lots of survey data telling us that parents are concerned with public schools,” West said. “This analysis gives us data on families’ revealed preferences, based on the decisions they’re making.” 

Over the last few years, news accounts in Greater Boston have reflected building frustration among parents in some of the area’s wealthiest towns, with many departures apparently spurred by new constraints on access to advanced coursework. and , each boasting some of the highest home values in the state, have reportedly lost sizable portions of their pre-COVID enrollment to nearby private schools. As one Newton teacher in the conservative Free Press, those migrations largely followed the district’s move away from “tracked” math classes.

Goodman, a resident of middle-income Cambridge, said he had seen parents in his own social circle consider independent schools out of impatience with both a lack of rigor and growing behavioral problems in their neighborhood schools.

“That’s the piece of the conversation that’s been missing for me in Massachusetts,” he said. “I haven’t seen school districts grappling with the questions of why they lost all these families, and whether they actually want to do the work to bring them back into schools.”

Rather than treating district buildings as contested territory, communities, districts and charter operators should view underused public space as an opportunity to expand access for students and make better use of the public’s investment in education infrastructure.

Experience from across the country shows that, even in a state at the forefront of education choice like Florida, legal frameworks aren’t enough to guarantee the equitable use of public resources. Charters’ access to public facilities also depends on local solutions and genuine collaboration between districts and charters.

In a co-authored by our organizations, the Florida Charter Institute and Momentum Strategy & Research, we analyzed 20 Florida counties that contain 90% of the state’s charter schools. Our findings show that enrollment in traditional district schools has steadily declined throughout the past decade, leaving over 645,000 seats available in district facilities. Charter school enrollment, meanwhile, has grown by more than 136,000 students over the same period. 

We estimate that 12% of all district facilities currently have the space available to house an average-sized Florida charter school. In fact, while falling student enrollment is a growing financial problem for Florida’s school districts, our research shows that the number of district-operated buildings slightly increased across the state during this period. 

Publicly available data shows that newly opened charter schools in Florida spend nearly one-quarter of their annual budget acquiring and maintaining suitable facilities. The state provides limited facility funding to defray capital expenses, but that covers only a portion of what charters pay toward their buildings. As a result, Florida charter schools rely on an industry of building developers, landlords and lenders, often placing them in commercial spaces that don’t meet students’ needs — even as hundreds of district facilities operate under capacity. 

We recently surveyed over 100 charter school leaders in Florida. Their responses indicate a growing need for solutions to the state’s facilities problem: 76% said their school was at or near enrollment capacity, and 52% responded they are exploring or planning to grow beyond their current facility. “Facility issues are the number one issue facing our ability to maintain or expand,” said one charter school leader in Naples, while an Orlando-based charter school referred to facilities funding as its “main source of concern.”

However, charters don’t appear to view district space as an option, as only 18% of survey respondents reported ever exploring the availability of underutilized district space. Those who do are met with resistance: The same Naples-based school noted that there was available capacity in nearby district schools but that “district leadership seems closed to the idea.” A charter leader in Miami commented that the district is “very averse” to facilities arrangements with charters. In fact, while Florida’s charter schools account for 14% of all public school enrollment in the state, only 4% operate in district-owned buildings.

Florida law lacks enforcement mechanisms that would obligate districts to share space with charter schools, instead provide “surplus” or “unused” facility space for charters “on the same basis as it is made available to other public schools in the district.” Research shows that, across the country, laws intended to expand charter access to district facilities often due to similarly vague language.

This year, Florida’s legislature partially addressed the issue through a measure that allows specially designated, high-performing charter schools to . However, the new law provides virtually no incentives for districts and no process to resolve disputes with charters or among competing charter operators. Districts are as the law goes into effect. 

Shared facilities arrangements between districts and charters require more than legal nudges from the state. Several cities, in fact, have demonstrated that such partnerships can effectively support resource-starved public schools. In New York City, for example, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his first chancellor, Joel Klein, promoted co-location to encourage charter growth, guided by the premise that available public school space should . Close to half of New York City charters now operate out of district buildings, and suggests that these arrangements have not negatively impacted student performance. 

In San Diego, the citywide school district established a to support the planning and placement of charters in district facilities. In Washington, D.C., the city developed a successful to house new charters. In Indiana, the 2014 establishment of allowed districts to attract independently run schools, including charters, and promoted facilities sharing. More recently, the Indiana state legislature has pushed Indianapolis to share facilities and buses among charter and district schools. 

Starting in 2008, Denver Public Schools leadership pursued a strategy that encouraged charter growth by sharing the district’s underutilized facilities. By 2017, the district had more charter and “innovation” schools — district-run schools that are afforded increased autonomy —, a strategy that led to “significant, sustained, systemwide improvements in learning.”

While our research revealed untapped opportunity in sharing school facilities, public data does not tell the whole story of whether a given building is suitable for a specific charter — making local agency even more necessary for working out where these opportunities lie.National charter leader Nelson Smith once school districts’ “monopoly” over public school facilities as “an accident of history.” In states like Florida, where charter schools are an enduring part of public education, sharing unused district space with charters is an untapped opportunity, but weak laws and local obstinacy remain obstacles. Stronger legal mechanisms from the state can open the door for change, but it is up to local leadership to implement those changes and, ultimately, rethink how we manage the public schoolhouse.

LAUSD’s chief financial officer in an interview last week said declining enrollments and the end of pandemic relief funds have forced the district to take cost-cutting measures.  

Schools have already been notified of how much they will have to cut from their budgets. The cuts will go into effect starting in August. 

LAUSD officials in June had predicted a $1.6 billion deficit for the 2027-28 school year. But an updated version of the budget  last week eliminates the deficit by using reserve funds plus cost-cutting measures over the next two years. 

The planned cuts to school budgets will begin in the 2026-27 school year, with school consolidations and staffing reductions planned for the following school year, said LAUSD Chief Financial Officer Saman Bravo-Karimi. 

“We have fewer students each year, and in LAUSD that’s been the case for over two decades,” Bravo-Karimi said. “That has a profound impact on our funding levels. Also, we had the expiration of those one-time COVID relief funds that were very substantial.”  

The district recently contracted with the consulting firm Ernst and Young to create models for closing and consolidating schools. While school officials wouldn’t say which schools or how many would be closed, the district has clearly been shrinking. 

Enrollment last year fell to 408,083, from a peak of 746,831 in 2002. Nearly half of the district’s zoned elementary schools are half-full or less, and 56 have seen rosters fall by 70% or more. 

Bravo-Karimi said in the current school year the district will spend about $2 billion more than it took in from state, local and federal funding. The trend of overspending is expected to continue next year and the year after that, he said.

The district’s board in June approved a three-year budget plan that included a $18.8-billion budget for the current school year. The plan delayed layoffs until next year, and funded higher spending in part by reducing a fund for retirees’ health benefits. 

According to , the district will save:  

• $425 million by clawing back funds that went unused by schools each year 
• $300 million by reducing staffing and budgets at central offices 
• $299 million by cutting special funding for schools with high-needs students
• $120 million by cutting unfilled school staffing positions
• $30 million by consolidating schools  
• $16 million by cutting student transportation 

Bravo-Karimi said the district gets virtually all of its money through per-pupil funding from the state. Since enrollment in the district has fallen steadily for decades, and then sharply since the pandemic, funding is down significantly, he said.

Most zoned L.A. elementary schools are almost half empty, and many are operating at less than 25% capacity. Thirty-four schools have fewer than 200 students enrolled; a dozen of those schools once had enrollment over 400.     

The drops have prompted LAUSD leaders to talk about closing or combining schools, a controversial step that other big U.S. cities  or considering. 

Bravo-Karimi said the district would assess the needs of communities and the conditions at local schools before it makes any decisions about school closings or consolidations. 

“That process needs to play out before any decisions are made about potential consolidation of school facilities,” he said.

Bravo-Karimi said other factors, including ongoing negotiations with labor unions, and changes to state funding, will further impact the district’s budget in the coming months. 

Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab and Research Professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, said the cuts planned for LAUSD are “relatively mild” compared to overall size of the district’s budget and cuts being considered at other  and the rest of the country. 

“I don’t think the people in the schools are going to notice that there’s a shrinking of the central office or that they’re using reserves,” said Roza. “Unless you’re one of the people who loses their transportation or if you’re in one of the schools that gets closed.” 

But, Roza said, many of the cuts taken by LAUSD can only be made once, and the district still faces profound changes as enrollments continue to fall and downsizing becomes more and more necessary. 

“This really should be a signal to families,” said Roza of the planned cuts in the district’s latest budget. “After several years of really being flush with cash, this is not the financial position that LA Unified is going to be in moving forward.” 

LAUSD Board Member Tanya Ortiz-Franklin, who represents LAUSD’s District Seven, which includes neighborhoods such as South L.A., Watts and San Pedro, said the district will work to shield kids from the impact of budget cuts. 

But, Ortiz-Franklin said, the district hired permanent staffers with one-time COVID funding, and now some of those staffers will have to be let go. 

Still, LA Unified has made strong gains since the pandemic, she said, and the district must work hard to preserve its upward trajectory despite financial headwinds. 

“We would love to share good news, especially this time of year,” said Ortiz-Franklin. “But the reality is, it is really tough.” 

School leaders across LAUSD received preliminary budgets for the next year over the last few weeks, said Ortiz-Franklin. Some schools in her district are facing cuts of up to 15%, forcing them to make tough decisions on which staffers to keep and who to let go. 

Several hundred additional layoffs will be announced in February, she said, when the district makes another assessment of staffing needs. 

“We don’t know the total number yet, and we don’t know which positions yet,” said Ortiz-Franklin.

A record number of children are enrolled in Michigan’s free preschool program this year, the second in which the state has invested in making it available for all children regardless of income.

But programs across the state still have plenty of openings, a sign that many families don’t know the program is available.

During a press conference Tuesday morning, officials from the Michigan Department of Lifelong Education Advancement and Potential announced that 51,000 children are enrolled in the Great Start Readiness Program. That’s an increase of 8,900 over last year.

During the 2023-24 school year, the last before the state launched its PreK for All initiative, 36,466 children were enrolled. A bipartisan effort in the Michigan legislature has invested additional money in the state budget to fund the expansion, which began with the 2024-25 school year.

The PreK for All initiative has been aimed at removing income and other restrictions on the Great Start Readiness Program, essentially allowing any child to enroll whether they are from a low-income home or not. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, in her 2023 proposal to gradually expand to a universal preschool program in Michigan, said it would “ensure children arrive at kindergarten ready to learn.”

The expansion comes as Michigan’s K-12 system has faced criticism because students have struggled on state and national exams at a time when many other states are showing more impressive gains.

The Great Start Readiness Program is one of four preschool programs in which the state is expanding access by eliminating income restrictions. The others include the federal Head Start program, developmental kindergarten, and early childhood special education.

Beverly Walker-Griffea, director of MiLEAP, said families who enroll their children in PreK for All programs save an estimated $14,000 each year. That’s crucial, she said, “at a time like this, when the cost of just about everything is going up.”

Blake Kish is a parent of six children under the age of 8. Two have been enrolled in the Great Start Readiness Program at St. George School in Flint Township.

“The PreK For All has been a blessing, of course, for the household, but mostly for the kids,” Kish said.

“I recommend any parent that has a child that is 4 years old, get your child in this program. Get your kid in the classroom, give them that head start, give them the winning edge,” Kish said. “We are shaping the future of Michigan.”

Emily Laidlaw, deputy director for early education at MiLEAP, noted that “children who attend a high quality pre-K program are more likely to graduate from high school, go on to college or career training and start their career strong.”

“Pre-K teaches critical social skills, including how to share, work and play together, and get along with others,” Laidlaw said.

Laidlaw said the state will continue to get the word out about the program to families across the state who have not yet enrolled.

Parents can visit

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Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

This school year, the Los Angeles school district has lost more than 13,000 immigrant students, mostly Hispanic, school officials said, with students fleeing in the months since U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement stepped up activity in Los Angeles in March.

The nation’s second-largest district now enrolls about 62,000 English learners, according to new figures obtained by The 74, down from more than 75,000 immigrant students in the 2024-25 academic year.   

“Some children are just choosing not to go back to school, especially those who are immigrants,” said Evelyn Aleman, founder of , a parents’ group which advocates for L.A.’s Spanish-speaking and low-income families. “That’s because they know that immigrant children have been arrested or detained by ICE.”

In the 2018-19 academic year, the district enrolled more than 157,000 English learners.  The downward trend of these students represents a stunning turnaround for a district that in 2003 was nearly half immigrant kids. It comes amid a districtwide decline in enrollment.  

L.A. is not the only city seeing declines in immigrant enrollment since ICE cracked down. Denver, Miami and San Diego have also . 

Since January, school officials, municipal leaders and state lawmakers have sought to present a brave face against the immigration crackdowns promised by President Donald Trump. Even before the ICE raids began, they issued guidance and rolled out tools and policies, and proposed legislation to limit federal immigration enforcement.

But the fear of ICE became real for many families, Aleman said, after federal agents in April showed up at two LAUSD schools seeking ‘access’ to young students. 

The federal agents’ school visits — with as many as four appearing at one time looking for information on children in grades one through six — were considered the first reported cases of Homeland Security authorities attempting to enter a U.S. school. 

School staffers turned the agents away in both cases, but outside of school grounds at least two LAUSD students have been arrested and held by ICE, Aleman said.  

“It isn’t because they don’t want to be in school,” said Aleman. “A big concern for families is that they’re going to be separated [by ICE]. Rather than see that, many are choosing to self-deport, or children who are high schoolers are choosing not to return.”

Instead, Aleman said, kids are staying home where they feel safe, or in some cases going to work outside their homes.  

According to LAUSD figures, the drop in immigrant students this year means LAUSD now enrolls about half as many of those kids as it did before the pandemic. 

Besides the ICE raids, factors including rising housing prices, falling birth rates and a tight local economy have also contributed to the exodus of immigrant students, said LAUSD Board Member , who represents , which includes neighborhoods such as South L.A., Watts and San Pedro.  

“People are having less children, and traditionally, in Latino families, there are more children. So that’s one area,” said Ortiz-Franklin. “And, obviously, the in Los Angeles is ridiculous.”

Recent fears around immigration enforcement and the future of public assistance, such as SNAP benefits, are also likely driving down immigrant populations, Ortiz-Franklin said. 

shows the immigrant students in 2003 accounted for about 45% of enrollment, with more than 325,000 English learners enrolled there. Since then, the number of immigrant students has fallen sharply.

But the ICE raids that began in L.A. this year have given immigrant families more reason to be concerned about sending their kids to school — or leave the city entirely. 

To bolster immigrant students’ sense of safety, LAUSD officials have established ‘perimeters of safety’ around campuses and instructed school staffers to refuse ICE agents entry, unless warrants are displayed.

The district has created its safe zones around schools by warning families to stay away when volunteer sentries spot ICE agents nearby. A free legal defense fund has been created for families facing enforcement.

Other measures include free busing to class, legal clinics for families, and remote lessons for when all else fails.

In a statement, a district spokesperson said LAUSD’s overall enrollment “continues to reflect a long-term downward trend observed across large urban districts in California and nationwide.” 

“Multiple factors contribute to these shifts, including declining birth rates, changes in housing affordability, and family migration patterns,” the spokesperson said. “In addition, increased federal immigration enforcement efforts have had a chilling effect in many communities.”

LAUSD officials and researchers said it’s difficult  to pinpoint where immigrant families are going when they leave. During the pandemic, L.A. superintendent Alberto Carvalho said some of these families had left the state for Texas and Florida for economic reasons.

Dean of the USC Rossier School of Education Pedro Noguera said LAUSD will face challenges in attracting more immigrant families, even with the measures to protect students from ICE raids.

“They’re taking a lot of extra steps to try to reassure the population, but it’s limited as to what they can do,” Noguera said.  “It’s a combination of several trends, all heavy at once, that is producing this significant decline,” adding LAUSD may soon have to make tough choices due to its shrinking class sizes.

Smaller class sizes have already prompted district leaders to consider measures such as closing schools or converting unused campus buildings for housing. 

Overall enrollment in LAUSD’s massive, 1,500-school system has cratered since its peak in 2002, when 746,831 students attended classes. This school year the district  enrolled 392,654 students, a drop of roughly 4% from last year’s count of 409,108, school officials said.

Enrollment this term has also failed to hit targets set during the budget process earlier in the year, indicating the losses are steeper than officials expected.

Julien Lafortune, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, said such declines are impacting districts around the state, of immigrant students.

“The growth of Los Angeles and other districts was driven by a lot of immigrants coming in, and then, on average, having more kids than the average native-born person,” he said. “Now, we’re seeing kind of the inverse of that. Kind of a bust after the boom.”

West Virginia schools continue to lose students, a continuing problem that has contributed to a wave of proposed school closures and consolidations around the state. 

State Schools Superintendent Michele Blatt said schools have lost 2.5% of their students in the past year.

The state’s enrollment is now 234,957 students for this current school year, Blatt shared on Wednesday during a state Board of Education meeting.

“Fifty-three of 55 of our districts did decrease in enrollment this year,” Blatt said, noting only Tyler and Doddridge counties had an increase in student population.

A new West Virginia enrollment showed a 6.5% decline from when the state had 250,899 students in the 2021-22 school year.

School officials have pointed to the state’s ongoing population decline as a major reason for the enrollment drop.

“There’s declining enrollment in our state as a whole and that’s affecting our school systems,” Blatt said.

West Virginia experienced decline in the nation from 2020 to 2024, a time period that included the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Multiple school districts school closures or consolidations this year. Last week, the Roane County Board of Education two elementary and middle schools at the end of the 2025-26 school year. The county plans to consolidate students into other nearby schools. The state Board of Education will have to approve the plan. 

Roane County School Board President Jeff Mace said funding was part of the problem, MetroNews . He said the state’s school funding formula needs to be modernized and should focus more on the needs of students rather than student enrollment.

“I believe if we don’t invest in our education, we’re just going to continue to drive all of our young people and our young talent out of the state and we’re going to prevent people from coming in,” Mace said. 

State school board President Paul Hardesty has already to fix the school funding formula during the next legislative session to prevent more school closures in the rural state. 

According to the state Department of Education, 16 public schools closed in 2024.

Micah Whitlow, director of the West Virginia Department of Education’s Office of School Facilities, said that counties are making these decisions “based on real problems.”

“These things aren’t done on a whim or they just woke up one day thinking about this. Some of them are staff shortages, finances, deteriorating facilities. Some of these it’s all those things together,” he said.

Expired pandemic relief funding and students opting out of public schools to use the state’s broad school voucher program – – have also put a financial strain on public schools. Around 19,000 students are using the voucher program this school year, typically at private religious schools. 

The enrollment report showed that public schools served 477 students using the Hope Scholarship; students using the Hope program can pay to take public school classes. Public schools also served 1,336 Hope Scholarship students that were not funded, according to the report. 

More than 4,000 children are attending virtual schools, which are considered public schools in West Virginia. Most of those students are enrolled in virtual charter schools. The state’s number of charter students has increased since the 2023-24 school year when 2,270 were enrolled.

Overall, most West Virginia students continue to be served in public schools as leaders grapple with financial issues, which can lead to .

“We can say that 98.2% of our students are still served in our public schools,” Blatt said. 

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com.

Wisconsin lawmakers are exploring ways to make it easier for school districts to consolidate as they face declining enrollment and financial difficulties.

There are 421 school districts in the state of Wisconsin and about two-thirds are struggling with declining enrollment. According to from the Department of Public Instruction, enrollment for public school districts in the 2025-26 school year fell by about 13,600 students, representing a nearly 2% decrease from last year’s estimate. Total enrollment across school districts is about 759,800 this year.

Reps. Joel Kitchens (R-Sturgeon Bay), Amanda Nedweski (R-Pleasant Prairie) and Sen. Mary Felzkowski (R-Tomahawk) said during an Assembly Education Committee public hearing Tuesday that declining enrollment is to blame for the financial troubles that schools are facing.

“The districts that are going to referendum all the time. It’s almost always because of declining enrollment. It just gets more expensive per student to educate those kids as the districts become smaller,” Kitchens said. “We’re not telling districts this is what you have to do or what you should do. We’re telling them this is an option for you to consider.”

Schools in Wisconsin have seen a drop of about 53,000 students over a decade, from the 2013-14 to 2022-23 school years. Kitchens pointed to estimates from the Wisconsin Department of Administration that the population in Wisconsin is projected to drop by 200,000 by 2050, noting it will be largely due to the state’s declining birth rate.

Wisconsin’s school funding system is based in part on per pupil numbers, meaning that if fewer students are enrolled schools receive decreased funding from the state, even if a district’s overall costs may not fall.

Kitchens said that having 421 school districts is not going to be sustainable in the long term in Wisconsin and questioned whether there is another state that “on a per capita basis has that many” school districts.

Kitchens said the issue shouldn’t be partisan. He noted that school consolidation is something that the on Wisconsin school funding supported through its recommendations.

“Many districts have used the referendum process to increase the property tax burden on the local residents to backfill the loss in state aid revenue,” Nedweski said. “Many others have seen them repeatedly fail as property taxpayers are unwilling to raise their taxes to increasingly fund empty schools.” She noted that a recent Marquette Law School Poll found that 57% of participants said they would vote against a referendum request. “There is no referendum that can be passed or law that can be signed to single-handedly reverse decades of birth rate declines to alleviate the stresses of declining enrollment in our schools. It’s clear that a more long-term solution is needed to address these demographic challenges because the status quo is not sustainable.”

Wisconsin has had a record number of school districts go to referendum to help meet costs. But beyond declining enrollment, public school advocates say the burden on local taxpayers asked to fund their schools through referendum has grown mostly due to the fact that state investments in public schools have not kept pace with inflation for almost two decades. In the most recent state budget, Wisconsin lawmakers provided additional special education funding, but opted not to provide any increase in general aid, leaving increased costs to fall on property taxpayers.

State Superintendent Tom McCarthy noted during the hearing that Wisconsin is currently spending the least, proportionally, in state revenue that it has ever spent on schools under the current funding formula. He noted that about 32.1% of state general purpose revenue goes to state general aid to schools, and that percentage used to be around 35%. He also said the conversation about declining enrollment and costs had to include the acknowledgement that school districts’ revenue limits have been frozen at different points over the last decade, prohibiting school districts from raising more funds unless they go to referendum to ask voters.

Nedweski said the bills would be useful tools and incentives for districts facing decisions about whether to consolidate.

“Buildings do not educate kids, teachers do,” Nedweski said. “By finding efficiencies through voluntary consolidation, districts will be able to reduce overhead and direct resources to the classrooms so that our students can continue to receive a quality education, while taxpayers receive relief on their property tax bills.”

The package of bills would take a number of steps to encourage districts to explore consolidation, including providing financial incentives.

School districts already receive additional aid when they consolidate. For the first five years after consolidation, a consolidated school district gets $150 per pupil. In the sixth year, the aid drops to 50% of what the school district received in the fifth year and in the seventh year, the aid drops to 25% of the fifth year.

would increase that additional state aid to schools that consolidate in 2026, 2027 and 2028 to $2,000 per pupil in the first year. The last six years would be the same as under current law.

Kitchens said that he thought most school districts would be able to decide within a year whether consolidation is something that they want to pursue.

“I’m very open in the future to extending that deadline, but I think to get it passed, we need to put a sunset on it, so we’re doing three years,” Kitchens said.

Dee Pattack, executive director of the Wisconsin School Administrators Alliance, noted that the inclusion of 2026 won’t really be useful for school districts since districts that want to consolidate have missed the opportunity to do so if they haven’t decided by now for next year. She also suggested that lawmakers look at spreading out the additional aid more gradually, saying that dropping aid from $2,000 to $150 per student creates a cliff.

Kitchens said he would look at amending the timeline included in the bill.

Rep. Francesca Hong (D-Madison) noted that decisions about consolidation can be emotional and personal for communities.

“Public schools are the heart of our communities, oftentimes in rural communities, especially. They’re one of the largest employers. It’s where you have the most celebrations. There’s athletic events that are important to everyone in the communities and so this decision of consolidation is deeply complex. It’s personal for a lot of school districts,” Hong said.

Hong, who is running in the Democratic primary for governor, questioned whether lawmakers had considered just leaving the decisions on consolidation up to local communities altogether, noting that Wisconsin law favors local control of schools.

“That’s why it’s voluntary. That’s why we’re offering these tools. It is not mandatory. We know it’s going to be difficult,” Kitchens said, adding that Door County used to be full of one-room school houses until there was a consolidation in 1960. “When they consolidated that and formed Southern Door [County] School District, people were out there with pitchforks. It’s always going to be difficult, but we have to look at the future and what it’s going to be.”

Kitchens noted that districts are not “clamoring” to consolidate and that the option exists as a last resort for most.

“There are a few that are, and you’ll hear from at least one of them today that really have reached that point where they know it’s necessary,” Kitchens said. “We’re not hearing districts begging for this.”

Joe Green, district administrator and director of special education for the Greenwood School District, and Chris Lindner, district administrator for the Loyal School District, testified about the rural school districts’ journey of consolidation, which their school boards are focused on getting done by July 1, 2028. They said it has been an emotional journey as people are attached to their schools and communities, but that it could be the best option for them.

“It might be the thing that gets us over the hump to consolidation,” Green said of the new legislative proposal. “It might be the funding that our two districts need to put a good plan in front of our communities. It might allow us to do some small projects to make consolidation smoother. There may be small construction, or things that we need to do to retrofit buildings, if that’s the way that our facility studies go. There’s a million different scenarios out there on what consolidation can look like. But without that funding, I mean, honestly, with our two districts $150 bucks a kid is $100,000 — not gonna do much with that… it’s just not going to do much.”

Green said the districts already share bus service and that 50% of their co–curricular activities are shared. They said that the schools began sharing students and staff due to their difficulty finding adequate staff to deliver instruction in rural Clark County in central Wisconsin.

Lindner said that consolidation could help open up more opportunities for students. “We do drama together. If we did not, we would have five to six students that would not be able to do drama because, you know, can’t do it with five or six kids,” he said.

Lindner said consolidation could also help save money.

“Our taxpayers are paying a lot of money for our operating referendums,” he said. “We tell communities if we do not start working together more, then we will be losing.”

would instruct DPI to provide grants of up to $25,000 to groups of two or more school district boards for the costs of a feasibility study for school district consolidation or whole grade sharing agreements.

Another bill,, would have DPI provide four-year grants of up to $500 per pupil enrolled in a single grade to school districts that enter into a whole-grade sharing agreement, agreeing to educate students at one location.

Felzkowski said that whole-grade sharing is a step before consolidation.

“It lets them test the waters if they ever want to move to full consolidation,” Felzkowski said, adding that middle and high schools may be able to provide more class offerings, including advanced coursework, to students with grade sharing.

AB 648 would help create new supplemental state aid for consolidated school districts to address differences in school districts’ levies when they merge. The measure is meant to address concerns of higher property taxes for residents of low-levy districts when a consolidation takes place.

AB 649 provides the funding for the bills, including $2.7 million for grants to schools that enter whole-grade sharing agreements, $3 million to provide state aid to offset levy limit differences and $250,000 for feasibility studies.

McCarthy of DPI noted at the hearing that there are already several legal and mechanical supports in place to encourage consolidation, and that even with those, the last major consolidation that took place was on July 1, 2018. Two K-8 districts merged to become the Holy Hill Area School District in Richfield.

McCarthy of DPI said the slate of bills being proposed are “largely building from past efforts to support and to incentivize consolidation” and that the agency doesn’t view them as “a brand new door that’s being opened up” to solve problems.

The final bill in the package, , would study what changes should be made to Wisconsin’s school districts. Under it, DPI would hire a contractor to conduct a study of Wisconsin’s school districts that looks at current school district boundaries, potential school district consolidations, existing school district facilities, staffing levels and salary scales, the population of school-age children in each school district, and revenue limits and current overall spending.

McCarthy said the agency is most excited about this final proposal. He said it is similar to what and addresses some of the factors that are important to consider when consolidating.

The study would culminate in recommendations for changes to school district boundaries, a survey on the conditions of school district facilities across the state, information on the current and 10-year projection of the population of school-age children in each district and recommendations for school district consolidations that promote efficiency, are geographically feasible and economically viable.

“We probably owe it to our school partners to take a long look at what are the right geographical boundaries here,” McCarthy said. “As we’re thinking about how to manage this stuff, it might be a good moment in time to slow down and think about how do we sync some of these things up to be a more effective patchwork of schools that are serving our communities?”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com.

New York City schools with fewer students than projected will not have to give back money midyear, Education Department officials announced Monday, as the public school system saw its biggest enrollment drop in four years.

Enrollment in the city’s K-12 and preschool programs fell by about 22,000, or 2.4%, compared to last year, according to the Education Department’s preliminary numbers. A total of 884,400 students were enrolled in the city’s traditional public schools as of Oct. 31, according to the figures.

Nearly two-thirds of the city’s roughly 1,600 schools had fewer students than projected, officials said. In past years, those schools would have had to pay back a total of more than $250 million to the city. But those funds will now stay with schools.

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“As we navigate enrollment fluctuations and uncertainty around federal funding, we’re committed to providing stability and ensuring every school has the resources it needs,” schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos said in a statement.

The remaining third of schools whose enrollment was higher than projected will receive extra money to account for the additional students, officials said, but didn’t say how much that will cost.

In some ways, Mayor Eric Adams’ parting gift to schools could become a headache for the next mayor, who will have to confront the costly but popular initiative.

City officials did not immediately offer an explanation for the enrollment drop, but it’s likely that changing immigration patterns played a role. Over the three school years prior to this one, city schools absorbed an influx of roughly 50,000 migrant students.

That surge helped offset declining enrollment, keeping the city’s student numbers relatively flat between 2022 and 2024. But immigration into the and has ground to a halt under President Donald Trump’s enforcement efforts. Adams has closed many of the emergency shelters the city opened to house migrants.

Several educators at schools with large immigrant populations have noticed sharp enrollment declines this year, driven by existing students leaving and fewer new ones showing up.

“We definitely have seen a decline this year in our schools that serve newcomers,” said John Sullivan, the superintendent overseeing transfer schools geared toward older high school students, at a hearing last week with the City Council.

Manhattan’s Liberty High School Academy for Newcomers is down about 200 students this year compared to its average enrollment in recent years, Sullivan said. More students learning English are dropping out of school early to take jobs, he said.

ELLIS Prep, another high school in the Bronx geared toward older newcomers, has , Principal Norma Vega said. The school is down about 30 students from last year and roughly 20 students under its projection for this year. That meant Vega would have had to pay back roughly $333,000 if the city had followed through with the midyear clawback.

Keeping that money will allow her to continue funding field trips, computers for students, and extra tutoring, she said.

Vega already missed the deadline for this school year to cut teachers, which means she would have started next school year with a deficit and likely would have lost her English as a New Language coordinator, one of her newest hires.

“It’s a blessing” to not have to pay back the funds midyear, Vega said.

Before the pandemic, schools typically had to give money back to the city during the middle of the school year if they enrolled fewer students than projected. (Those that enrolled more students would get extra funds midyear.)

The policy to keep school budgets afloat despite enrollment, known as being “held harmless,” was initially enacted during the pandemic when many schools saw their rosters dwindle but had mounting needs to support students academically and emotionally.

Enrollment citywide has been on the decline for a decade, but went into freefall during the pandemic, . This year’s enrollment decline is the largest since the 2021-22 school year, when enrollment fell by around 36,000 students, or 3.8%, from the previous year.

The city halted the hold harmless only to

Last school year, the decision not to claw back school budgets midyear meant schools hung onto $157 million they would have otherwise had to give back. City officials to ensure that no schools started out this school year with less funding than they had at the start of last school year.

This year’s total is far larger, given the steeper enrollment decline.

Emily Paige, the principal of Urban Assembly Unison, a small Brooklyn middle school, said she was on the hook for roughly $100,000 because of enrollment losses — enough to cover an entire teacher salary.

While the hold harmless policy is widely popular among school staff and families, it can be an unsustainable practice, some observers say, artificially inflating schools’ budgets and creating even more difficult financial decisions down the road as the city confronts increasingly expensive small schools.

The union representing principals, the Council for School Administrators, or CSA, claimed the move as a victory for its members, saying in an email to principals on Sunday its “top priority” this year has been ensuring the city kept its promise to hold schools harmless.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Alabama’s public school enrollment could see its largest decline in 40 years, Alabama State Schools Superintendent Eric Mackey told members of the Alabama State Board of Education on Thursday.

Enrollment in the state’s K-12 schools in the 2024-25 school year , a slight increase over 2023-24. The department did not release numbers Thursday for the 2025-26 school year, but Mackey said Thursday only about 12 schools have seen growth in enrollment while other districts have seen numbers decline.

About 5,000 students have been unenrolled from public schools in the state with roughly 3,000 students total taking funds to go to a private school.

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The CHOOSE Act is a voucher-like program that offers families up to $7,000 per qualifying child for education related expenses including private school tuition. The program currently operates under income caps scheduled to be lifted next year.

“We know a portion of [the students] took CHOOSE Act dollars and we’re working with the governor’s office and the Department of Revenue to figure out exactly what that number looks like,” he told board members.

The department is expected to release final numbers next Friday.

The loss of students is a nationwide problem. In May, the that there would be a decline in public school enrollment, due to growth in private and charter school enrollment and the general aging of the population. Nationwide, public school enrollment is expected to fall by 7.6% by 2031. Alabama’s

Mackey said Thursday he was mostly concerned with the 2,100 students who were enrolled last year that never showed up for school.

“They didn’t transfer to private school, they didn’t go to home school, they didn’t go to school in another state. They just disappeared,” he told the School Board of Education.

Mackey said local superintendents have reported to him that a majority of the unaccounted students are Hispanic.

“We don’t know if they’re still living in this state, just not going to school. If they have moved to another state, they did not enroll in school in that state,” he told the board. “If they left the country, we don’t know if they are documenting students or undocumented, because, as you know, that’s something we are not allowed to ask, and we don’t ask under federal law.”

According to the , about 12% of students enrolled in Alabama public schools are Hispanic.

Mackey said getting these students back in school is important for their progress.

“If those students all come back to us in January and they missed a semester of instruction, we’re going to teach them, but we’re going to pick them up where they are,” he said. “I would implore, publicly, [for] parents to get them back in school. The sooner they get back in school quicker, we can catch them up and move them forward.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com.

When enrollment drops, districts often slash programs, lay off staff and close schools. All this hurts students in the process. Yet fewer students can be an opening to improve learning. In fact, declining enrollment offers a rare chance to to better incorporate research on how students learn best, paving the way for smaller learning communities, expanded personalized learning options and stronger relationships — all of which can lead to more individualized, joyful and relevant learning.

State leaders can help districts seize this moment by rethinking California’s practice of funding schools by daily attendance, not overall enrollment, which punishes districts for every absence. The current system worsens budget instability for those districts already experiencing long-term enrollment declines; it also hits immigrant communities hardest in an era of heightened enforcement and fear.

Stanford professor Thomas Dee that immigration enforcement in five Central Valley school districts led to a 22% increase in absenteeism compared to the same months in the prior years. Similar patterns emerged during in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The financial implications are significant: LAUSD loses approximately in state revenue for every one percentage point drop in average daily attendance. For a district already navigating declining enrollment, this revenue loss compounds fiscal strain and penalizes schools that serve communities most affected by immigration enforcement.

Stabilizing school budgets amid enrollment decline starts with a simple fix: fund districts by whom they enroll, not who shows up each day. This would recognize that school districts hire teachers and other staff and equip schools with computers and textbooks , not attendance. The California legislature offered a short-term safeguard by approving , which would hold districts’ funding harmless if they experience sudden changes to average daily attendance due to immigration action.

The state can also increase its funding amounts under the Local Control Funding Formula to recognize that California is still falling short of providing adequate funding. Two other bills in the two-year legislative session, and, aim to increase school funding so that districts can pay teachers what they are worth, keep pace with rising costs, and remain nationally and globally competitive. 

But districts can’t afford to wait while these proposals move slowly through the legislature[. The fiscal challenges created by declining enrollment are already here, leaving districts like LAUSD with limited options for achieving financial stability as they serve fewer students. The district’s enrollment decline is acute. In a we detail how LAUSD has lost more than 316,000 students – approximately 40% of its enrollment – since the 2002-03 school year. This trend stems from falling birth rates, demographic shifts and a housing crisis; it’s further exacerbated by the pandemic, wildfires and federal immigration raids. 

State policymakers could turn this fiscal challenge into an opportunity by enabling districts to experiment with new staffing models, flexible use of facilities and innovative instructional designs. These require local will, but also stable, equitable funding and regulatory flexibility, which are tools only the state can provide.

Without them, even the most promising local ideas will fall short. LAUSD’s per-pupil funding has risen, but costs and long-term obligations have grown faster, narrowing the district’s fiscal margin. The real challenge isn’t just fewer students, but the widening gap between needs and resources. Districts like LAUSD are being asked to do more with less in a system that remains inadequately funded. 

Education leaders nationwide are watching how California navigates this moment. Districts must redesign for the future as enrollment shrinks, and the state must ensure they have the means to do so. Enrollment decline may be inevitable, but a decline in student opportunity doesn’t have to happen.

Since the through the Opportunity Scholarship program in North Carolina, many have predicted an increase in the number of private schools across the state.

So far, EdNC has reported that market share — across traditional public, public charters, private schools, and homeschools — is .

This week, (PEFNC) announced the launch of EduBuilder, an initiative designed to help what it calls “edupreneurs” start and expand private schools in North Carolina.

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The initiative aims to “add thousands of private school seats across the state in the coming year,” according to a .

EduBuilder says it will provide resources, strategic guidance, and advocacy to school leaders.

Currently, according to the , there are 930 private schools across the state, including 603 religious schools and 327 independent schools. That number is up from 881 private schools statewide in 2023-24, growth that is consistent with historical trends.

This map shows by county how many students were enrolled in private schools in 2024-25.

Eleven counties didn’t have a private school in 2024-25, including Alleghany, Ashe, Camden, Caswell, Gates, Graham, Jones, Martin, Perquimans, Tyrrell, and Washington counties.

Here is how the number of private schools grew in North Carolina between 1994-95 and 2024-25. You can see the data along with the growth in the number of students .

In North Carolina, private schools are required to register with the (DNPE). Here is what is required to register:

According to , here is a look at how the fiscal year appropriations for the Opportunity Scholarship Grant Fund Reserve have grown and will grow between 2017-18 and 2031-32, thus incenting the establishment of more private schools.

(NCSEAA), “Once a school is registered with DNPE, the school may apply through NCSEAA to receive Opportunity Scholarship and Education Student Accounts (ESA+) program funding. Registration with each agency is separate and registration with DNPE does not automatically guarantee registration with NCSEAA.”

Registration with NCSEAA includes submitting a new school sign up request, a background check, and the submission of documents. Once registered, the private school is listed as a “direct payment school” by NCSEAA. is the current list of those schools for 2025-26.

will open in February 2026 for the 2026-27 school year. Schools must submit a new school signup request no later than June 15, and the final day for schools to submit their registration documents is June 30.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

Saugus’s policy change goes against a torrent of federal and state initiatives aimed at limiting educational access to newcomers, particularly those in the country illegally. The Trump administration has detained and deported K-12 students and recently barred undocumented preschoolers from Head Start and older students from career, technical and adult education. In many states, those federal directives have been put on hold pending a Sept. 3 hearing.

The Saugus school registration requirement was challenged in court last year by Lawyers for Civil Rights, Massachusetts Advocates for Children and Anderson & Kreiger LLP. The state attorney general’s office also aided in the effort. 

“We are ecstatic,” said Erika Richmond Walton, an attorney with Lawyers for Civil Rights, who added that her group will continue to monitor school enrollment to ensure every family can register “without fear or unnecessary hurdles.”

Neither district officials nor multiple Saugus school board members responded to The 74’s requests for comment. They’ve stated previously that their enrollment procedures followed the law. 

Richmond Walton said the school’s turnaround came as a shock: In a recent admissions policy directive, it omitted the census clause. The instead centered on proof of residence and the district’s desire to ferret out anyone not living within its borders.

“It did come as a surprise to me,” she said. “It was a fight we had been fighting for well over a year.”

The new development in the Saugus case coincides with the state’s recent adoption of the , which affirms the educational rights of immigrant children and students with disabilities. Undocumented students’ right to attend school is already enshrined in the landmark 1982 Supreme Court decision Plyler v. Doe, but that ruling is under attack in some conservative states. 

“This law comes at a time of rising federal threats to civil rights,” Massachusetts Advocates for Children said about the state’s initiative, which was signed by Gov. Maura Healey on Aug. 5. “While federal protections for immigrant students and students with disabilities are in jeopardy, Massachusetts has taken a bold stand to ensure that those rights remain protected here at home.”

In Saugus, Walton said the district required families to fill out a census form as part of a local headcount conducted every year. In order to comply, she said, they had to get the document from town hall. Once they did, she said, the town would initiate an inspection of their living quarters. 

A family with an elementary-aged child was barred from completing the form because they were heating their home with space heaters, she said. In another case, one family was doubled up with another, and the one that sought to enroll a child was not the leaseholder, which disqualified them. Both were eventually allowed to attend school when Massachusetts Advocates for Children intervened.

Adam Strom, executive director of Boston-based , said the district’s reversal is critical.

“It protects something fundamental: every child’s right to attend school,” Strom said. “No student should have their education held hostage by discriminatory policies.”

Students of all ages have been targeted for deportation across the country since the start of the year. Some have been in federal detention for weeks, with while others have been . 

Earlier this summer, on his way to volleyball practice was detained by immigration agents before winning his release. 

The Saugus school district served in 2023, up from 2,297 in 2021. Nearly 30% of the student body was identified as Hispanic or Latino two years ago, up from 20.6% in 2021. 

Just under 10% were English learners in 2023, up from 6.3% two years prior. 

The school superintendent’s secretary, Dianne Vargas, told The 74 a year ago that the census requirement was waived for incoming immigrant students. 

But, she said then, the district did require other forms of paperwork meant to protect these students’ welfare so the district could “make sure they are with a parent or guardian — that they actually have someone who is caring for them so we don’t have doubling up and people aren’t passing children around.” 

Fewer than 52% of Indiana high school graduates from the Class of 2023 went directly to college, according to the latest data quietly released by the Indiana Commission for Higher Education.

That’s the state’s lowest rate in recent history and .

Just 51.7% of 2023 graduates, about 39,000 students, enrolled in college within a year of finishing high school, data showed. That’s down from a steady 53% between 2020 and 2022, and far below the state’s peak of 65% a decade ago.

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Around 36% of all graduating seniors enrolled in one of Indiana’s public four-year institutions, followed by 8% who chose a private college or university.

Another 7.6% went to a school outside of Indiana, according to the data.

The figures, earlier this month, reflect concerns state leaders have long expressed about Indiana’s declining college-going culture, especially as the state shifts focus toward career credentials and work-based learning.

“The startling drop in our college-going rate yet again can be credited to the lack of two things: money and morale,” said Rep. Ed DeLaney, D-Indianapolis, in a statement released Wednesday.

“While our governor has been taking a victory lap for getting our state universities to freeze tuition, he has failed to guarantee that his move will not decrease financial aid and scholarship opportunities,” DeLaney continued. “Any lack of opportunity for tuition support will lead to more Hoosiers not being able to afford college and being forced to choose a different path.”

The 2023 numbers come just six months after the higher education commission approved sweeping changes to Indiana’s high school diploma, set to take effect statewide in 2029, that emphasize work-based learning and career readiness over traditional college preparation.

High schoolers will be required to earn at least one “diploma seal” to graduate, including options for employment or postsecondary readiness. While some seal options are specifically geared toward college-bound students, graduates will no longer be required to complete all the coursework or meet other criteria typically expected for college admission.

DeLaney maintained that Republican leaders “have been devaluing the opportunities that our colleges and universities can offer students.”

“At the same time, the supermajority has made attacking colleges and universities the centerpiece of their culture war agenda — from policing what can be taught in the classroom, to forcing institutions to eliminate hundreds of degree options, to creating an entirely new high school diploma that emphasizes the path directly into the workforce,” the lawmaker said.

“Trying to bury this report in a website and not send a press release is a telling sign that the Commission on Higher Education knows this does not look good, and does not act to fix it,” DeLaney added. “It simply isn’t important enough to them. They are busy eliminating college courses and creating new tests. This is what the legislature has asked them to do.”

CHE has not issued a press release on the latest data and did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Indiana’s college-going rate has dropped more than any other state tracked by the National Center for Education Statistics over the past 15 years.

Previously, Indiana reached a college-going rate of 65%.

“We set a goal to get it back when it slumped,” DeLaney recalled. “Now, it doesn’t seem like we care to address the issue. That is a shame for our students, a shame for our economy, and a shame for our state.”

Earlier this year, Republican lawmakers passed additional legislation requiring public colleges to eliminate low-enrollment degree programs. So far, Indiana’s public colleges and universities .

“The supermajority has been in power for 20 years and this is their achievement,” DeLaney said. “At some point we have to ask ourselves: is a declining college-going rate not the result they want?”

By the numbers

According to the numbers published on , the vast majority of 2023 grads who continued their education earned some form of college credit while still in high school: 85.6% of college-goers took and passed an Advanced Placement exam; 64.6% earned dual credit; 90.7% , which comes with a block of 30 general education credits that can be transferred to and accepted at colleges across the state; 86.3% earned as associate’s degree; and 63.6% earned another type of credential.

A quarter of postsecondary enrollees, 25%, are seeking STEM-related degrees, while:

• 17.8% enrolled in business and communications programs
• 16% enrolled in health programs
• 11% enrolled in social and behavioral sciences and human services programs
• 9.9% enrolled in arts and humanities programs
• 7.4% enrolled in trades programs
• 5.8% enrolled in education programs
• 7% were undecided

College-going among male students dropped to 45%, compared to 59% for female students — widening an existing gender gap.

Among racial groups, Asian and white students had the highest college-going rates, at 70.7% and 54%, respectively. The college-going rates among other racial groups lagged, though, at 45.5% for Black students, and 41.7% for Hispanic students.

The rate for students from low-income backgrounds — as measured by eligibility for free or reduced lunch — was 38.7%, compared to about 60% for their higher-income peers.

More than 78% of college-bound graduates from the 2023 cohort were part of Indiana’s 21st Century Scholars program, according the the new data. The  covers full tuition and fees at Indiana colleges and universities for low-income students, who enroll in the 8th grade.

Also previewed in the data was an update on the Class of 2022.

The CHE dashboard showed 53% of the 2022 cohort that enrolled in a postsecondary program within a year after high school graduation met all three early college success benchmarks: ​​they did not need remediation; they completed all courses they attempted during their first year of enrollment; and they persisted to their second year of schooling.

According to the latest numbers, 77.5% of the 2022 cohort that enrolled in a postsecondary program persisted to the second year.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com.

Across the country, public school enrollment has failed to rebound to pre-pandemic levels — and data suggests the decline is far from over.

According to projections from the National Center for Education Statistics, public K-12 enrollment peaked at 50.8 million students in autumn 2019, but is to fall by nearly 4 million students to 46.9 million by 2031, a 7.6% nationwide drop.

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The enrollment losses are in elementary and middle grades, with districts in the Northeast, West and Rust Belt most affected. When public school enrollment fell by 3% in 2020, it was the largest single-year decline World War II.

The NCES 2024 December , which accounts for fall 2023 data, found that 18 states saw public school enrollment declines of more than 4%. Ten states — California, Colorado, Hawaii, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and West Virginia declined more than 5%.

A new study from Boston University that high-income districts and middle schools in Massachusetts were especially vulnerable, with middle grade enrollment in fall of 2024 down almost 8% and the most significant losses concentrated among white and Asian students.

Public school enrollment in Massachusetts was down 2% from pre-pandemic trends for the fall 2024 school year, while private school enrollment rose 14% and homeschooling surged 45%.

Long-term demographic shifts — such as falling birth rates, domestic migration and a post-COVID shift toward school choice — are also a factor in public school enrollment declines. Parents increasingly opt for private, charter or homeschooling models — options that rapidly during and after the pandemic.

A February Gallup showed that dissatisfaction with the U.S. public education system is rising, with the percentage of adults who report feeling satisfied about public education falling from 37% to 24% between 2017 and 2025.

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools a net gain of 400,000 students over five years, offsetting some of the 1.8 million student losses from traditional districts.

Public school funding, often tied to enrollment, is also shrinking. According to the Reason Foundation, 98 public schools in 2023-24 across 15 states, with significant losses in California, Colorado, Florida and New York. Districts are facing tough decisions around school consolidations, staffing and infrastructure.

ProPublica reported that shrinking enrollment roughly 150 Chicago schools operating at half-capacity this past school year, with another 47 at one-third capacity.

However, some researchers offer a more nuanced view. A Kennesaw State University researcher that declining enrollment can lead to higher per-student funding. Since districts often retain funding for students who’ve left, those resources can be reallocated to support remaining students, improving staff compensation and access to teachers and other support services.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

The number of students experiencing homelessness who were enrolled in California’s TK-12 public schools has jumped over 9% for yet another year, .

Nearly 20,000 more homeless students were enrolled by the first Wednesday in October, known as Census Day, during the 2024-25 school year. This increase represents a 9.3% change from the previous school year, and it means the homeless student population in the state has surged 37% in the last decade.

Schools say the spike in homelessness is due both to families’ worsening financial troubles and improved identification efforts. Covid-era funding, refined data tracking, and improved training and protocol have resulted in schools being more likely to properly identify homeless students than in the past.

“It’s a combination of a perfect storm where you have all of these elements coming into play, which then speaks to that increase. The data is highlighting the need to continue these supports,” said Alejandra Chamberlain, youth services director for the Contra Costa County Office of Education.

Families are increasingly financially strained

Coachella Valley Unified School District’s homeless student enrollment tripled, a reflection of the economic struggles their families are experiencing, said Karina Vega, a district support counselor.

Increased fear of immigration enforcement is contributing to homelessness in the area. Vega shared how a student’s mother could no longer afford to pay rent after her husband was deported; another family lives in their car, and they travel each weekend across the Mexican border to spend time with a deported parent; others are constantly moving to stay off the radar of immigration officials because they fear being deported.

Many of her students live in inadequate housing. Electricity may need to be wired from one trailer to the next, water may have been shut off, or multiple families live in a small space due to financial hardship.

“We’ve seen more families than we’ve probably ever seen” experiencing homelessness, Vega said.

But she noted that students were identified at a greater rate after more school personnel learned that homelessness does not only mean someone is on the streets.

“The reality is, a lot of us that work for the school district grew up in the valley and some of these things that we see are typical, like trailer parks and inadequate housing,” Vega said.

This is where the (Riverside) county’s training on identifying all types of homelessness, an effort they have championed down to the school sites, has made a significant difference, she added.

In Mendocino County, many families who once held jobs in the waning marijuana industry are now struggling to make ends meet, said Blythe Post, coordinator of foster youth and homeless services at the Mendocino County Office of Education.

Their rural 89,000-person county is vast, but there are few affordable housing options to choose from, she said, pushing more and more of their students and families into homelessness.

But increased homelessness is only one part of the problem.

‘I anticipate we will see a huge drop’

Although the official number of homeless students continues to rise, liaisons believe the actual numbers are far higher.

Under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, every public school district, county office of education and charter school is required to hire a local liaison to ensure that homeless youth are identified and have the educational services they need to succeed academically. This federal law is also the reason that schools have counts of homeless students at all.

This law may be at risk under the Trump administration if the U.S. Department of Education is shuttered or its funding is lumped into a block grant as stated in .

“There’s going to be more kids to count and fewer people to count them, and then fewer services,” said Margaret Olmos, director of the National Center for Youth Law’s Compassionate Education Systems.

Liaisons say accurate counts are difficult to reach for a host of reasons. The information is self-reported, and some families are reluctant to share their housing status with school personnel. It’s rare that a school liaison only serves homeless students. Most have divided attention because they are supporting foster students and low-income students. In smaller districts, they may be the support liaison for all students.

In some ways, schools have been here before. During the 2022-23 school year, for example, the rate of homeless students enrolled in California schools  while overall student enrollment dipped.

Then, as now, families were confronting skyrocketing housing and cost-of-living expenses. The rolling impact of expiring eviction moratoriums put in place during the pandemic and the loss of housing due to disasters, including fires and , have further exacerbated the issue. And, similarly, liaisons attributed much of the increase to families being squeezed financially as identification practices were simultaneously improved.

But while the situation might appear familiar, liaisons say they are at a crossroads — and many do not think the odds are in their favor.

Liaisons said a 2021 state law requiring that schools include a housing questionnaire in enrollment packets has supported identification efforts. But many say what made the single, greatest difference is the one-time funding they received from the pandemic-era American Rescue Plan – Homeless Children and Youth (ARP-HCY) federal grant. The total amounted to  over several years.

“ARP-HCY was the first time you saw school districts and counties be incentivized to find and care and count — and they did,” Olmos said.

How districts and counties applied the funds varied widely. Liaisons said it depended on their school community’s needs. Some booked short-term motel stays for students whose families were being evicted or were on homeless shelter waiting lists or provided transportation to and from school. Other liaisons hired staff to improve data tracking or who spoke students’ native languages. Still, others established after-school care, provided baby supplies for students’ younger siblings, or purchased washers and dryers to provide free laundry services for families.

Some districts opted to focus a portion of funds on improving data tracking practices.

Mendocino County’s Round Valley Unified went from one homeless student to 199 in just one school year — one of the greatest surges in the state. That increase was a reflection of more data training and tightened protocols, Post said.

“When I see those jumps in numbers … that tells me that there’s a problem with identification or communication between who’s inputting the records and who’s submitting those data reports,” Post said.

What comes next?

There are no plans by either the federal or state government to replenish the one-time federal funds at anywhere near the same levels, which has left some liaisons to  and lament a near future with lowered capacity to count and serve homeless students.

“There’s going to be a number of families that just fall under the radar,” Post said. “I anticipate we will see a huge drop in McKinney-Vento numbers; those families will just not be served or identified.”

Some districts do rely on funds from the federal McKinney-Vento law, but educators say the 1987 act was never adequately funded by the state or federal government. Funding cycles are every three years, and it’s a competitive grant that reaches few districts. California received less than $15 million in this funding for the 2022-23 school year, for example, which went to just 6% of the state’s school districts, according to  by SchoolHouse Connection and the University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions program.

The state has released billions of dollars in recent years to address general homelessness. But funds aimed at youth are often targeted to those over the age of 18, including $56 million in new grants announced Friday by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office.

Liaisons have also long highlighted that few of those dollars ultimately reach students who are living doubled-up — where more than one family lives in a single home due to financial crises — which is how the majority of homeless students in the state and nationwide live. Doubling-up is identified as homelessness under the McKinney-Vento act, but not under other federal definitions of homelessness.

And while schools receive extra funding for homeless students from the state through the state’s Local Control Funding Formula, or LCFF, this stream is often limited in how it can be spent and is shared among several vulnerable student groups with differing needs.

“There is a part of really acknowledging to the community that other special populations receive state funding to be able to carry out the responsibilities and to dedicate staff to do that work” while homeless students rely on the limited federal dollars, said Chamberlain, who is also one of three leads for the state’s Homeless Education Technical Assistance Center network.

Advocates have pushed for the state to, at a minimum, match the McKinney-Vento dollars California receives, but that amount has yet to make it into the state budget.

Despite the increases, liaisons and advocates are clear that the rising numbers alongside decreasing dedicated funding puts kids at risk.

“If we cannot identify these kids early and serve them and ensure they go on to a choice-filled adulthood, they’re so much more likely to end up experiencing homelessness as an adult,” Olmos said.

“,” a 36-page report published by  a nonpartisan nonprofit led by Tim DeRoche, an author and parent who lives in Los Angeles, draws on official attendance data for LAUSD’s zoned elementary schools for the years 1995 to 2024. 

Among the 456 LAUSD elementary schools examined in the report, enrollment is down 46% from their peak over the last two decades, while over half of these schools have seen enrollment decline by over 50%. 

The decline has left a lot of open space in 39 high-performing schools, but that doesn’t mean LA students are filling them, according to DeRoche’s analysis. In fact, he and his team found nearly 7,000 empty seats in the sought-after schools. 

DeRoche said that leaves a lot of empty seats at those schools and others like them.   

For example, high-scoring Ivanhoe Elementary in Silverlake enrolled 432 students in 2024, down from its peak of 467 students, leaving 35 empty seats, according to DeRoche’s analysis. Overland Elementary in West L.A. enrolled just 488 students, down from its peak of 557. Lanai Road Elementary in Encino had ten empty seats, according to the report. 

Under state law, traditional district schools are required to offer available seats to any LAUSD student who lives outside of the school’s attendance zone. 

LAUSD officials disputed the findings and methodology of “Crisis in the School House,” saying its use of peak enrollment to measure school capacity is inaccurate, because those schools were overcrowded then. 

DeRoche admitted his measurements were imperfect but said the gist of his analysis stuck.

Given the fact that most kids in L.A. attend lower-performing schools, and that the district is  with no end in sight, DeRoche  to open those high-performing schools up by reassessing enrollment zones.

“We’re trying to work for a system in which there’s more equitable access to these really coveted public schools, and it’s not based on your wealth,” said DeRoche, who  on U.S. attendance zones.

DeRoche’s critique of admissions comes as LAUSD is contracting. Since the pandemic, the district has lost more than 70,000 students. Current enrollment sits at 408,083, down from a peak of 746,831 in 2002.

Decades of shrinking classes recently prompted L.A. school board president Scott Schmerelson to say district leadership needs to start talking about closing or combining schools, something that some other big U.S. cities are already doing.

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has countered with a proposal to close down unused parts of school campuses while keeping schools operational, a tactic LAUSD is already deploying at some campuses.  

“Crisis in the School House” focuses in part on a group of L.A.’s two-dozen top-scoring traditional district elementary schools. 

The report’s analysis of enrollment data for last year shows those schools had room for at least 4,306 more students. In addition, the report found almost 3,000 additional seats in district-run charter schools. But just four district schools reported only 58 open seats in the district’s Open Enrollment system for incoming students, DeRoche said.

The upshot is that kids, including those most in need, are shut out of good schools, said DeRoche, something he’s seen happen in  around the country.

Like those of other districts, Los Angeles schools post uneven scores on state exams, with lower-income, mostly minority schools earning lower marks. This matters, said DeRoche, because it perpetuates cycles of poverty and hands an unfair advantage to the wealthy.

Of the 456 LAUSD neighborhood elementary schools in DeRoche’s study, just 39 managed to get 70% or more of students reading at grade level. In those 39 schools, 45% of the students were white, while the other 417 schools in the study were only 7% white. 

In an interview, LAUSD’s senior executive director of strategy and innovation Derrick Chau said DeRoche also failed to account for important programs that are serving district students, such as magnet schools.

“We do have programs that have been and continue to be in high demand,” said Chau. “The reality is, as a system, we are recalibrating across the board on how to deal with changing enrollments.”

Chau said the district is pursuing a number of tactics to boost enrollment in schools and also ensure seats in sought-after schools are distributed in a fair and equitable manner.

“I think we just need to readjust our system to make sure that we look at those programs, replicate them, and bring them to more students,” he said.