L.A. Unified’s Math Off by 5,000

For the second year in a row, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s enrollment projections have missed the mark: Nearly 5,000 students failed to show up, resulting in a loss of $22 million in state funding and the reassignment of dozens of teachers.

Although district officials said they had predicted lower numbers this year, they were surprised by the far lower numbers. The district, still the nation’s second-largest, has an enrollment this year of 718,334.

Officials and demographers attribute the decline to a sluggish economy, declining birth rates and high Southern California housing costs.

“We obviously knew we were going to have some declining enrollment,” said Supt. Roy Romer. “The size of it surprised me.”

The official enrollment count, taken last Friday, occurs annually in the fourth week of school. This year, it is forcing principals to reassign 113 teachers. Parents, particularly those whose children are in elementary schools, tend to be frustrated by the classroom changes.

Last year, district officials overestimated enrollment in the elementary grades. The enrollment projection then was off by 10,000 students, representing a loss of $46 million in state funding.

United Teachers Los Angeles President John Perez said such inaccurate estimates have a traumatic effect on teachers and students, and that the district should have planned better this year. “They have been off more times than they have been on,” he said.

For most schools, losing teachers means increasing class sizes. As part of their contracts, these teachers cannot be laid off, but many go into a “district pool” and work as substitutes until they can find a new job within the district, district officials said. Romer said that pool will save the district about $9 million in substitute costs, offsetting the $22-million loss in state funding.

Romer said district demographers cannot predict every factor that will affect enrollment, such as higher housing costs.

“We use all the demographic strategies everybody else uses,” he said. Something is causing a shift in enrollment trends in Los Angeles, he said, and “we don’t all know yet what it is.”

Districts across the state have seen similar enrollment drops due to birth declines and tough economic times, according to Shelley Lapkoff, a school enrollment specialist in California. “A lot of schools are hurting; some are dipping into reserves,” she said. “Others are having cutbacks in funding and teachers.”

Despite the loss of 4,961 students, Romer said, he is pushing forward with an aggressive school construction plan over the next five years. He said that even with declining enrollment, the district will not have enough seats to accommodate all of its students and take them off year-round schedules in the next 40 years. “We’re 30,000 seats short,” Romer said, “even after we build everything.”

The biggest drop in the district came in elementary school enrollment, which lost 10,935 students. That number was offset slightly by a jump of 2,367 middle and high school students.

The district had estimated that there would be 3,838 fewer students this year for a total enrollment of 723,295. The total decline in enrollment from last year to this year was 8,799 students.

“We can account for 300 of them,” said Kevin Baxter, assistant principal of Fulton College Preparatory School in Van Nuys, which nearly lost 11 teachers. The school dipped into funds it had planned to use to expand an office and buy a bungalow, to save five teaching positions instead.

“What killed us was the economy,” Baxter said. “People are just saying they can’t afford to buy a home here.”

Baxter said he has looked at transcript requests for students who left his school and noticed that most have moved to such cities as Las Vegas or Phoenix. “Very few of them stayed with the district,” he said.

Cheremoya Elementary School in Hollywood lost five students, said Principal Chris Stehr, probably because apartment rents in the neighborhood have risen and many of his students come from poor families. But the dip was enough to cause the loss of one teacher, he said, and parents were outraged.

“They rallied around us,” he said. “They went looking everywhere. But nobody is hiding their kids in their homes.”

This is the second year in a row that Kittridge Elementary School in Van Nuys has had to grapple with a drop in enrollment. Last year, it lost a few dozen students and 11 teachers, said Assistant Principal Maria Isabel Johnson. This year, it planned for 1,300 students but ended up with 1,126, she said. The school lost one teacher.

The effect on families is rough, she said, because Kittridge is a year-round school and parents with several children may have to place them on different tracks. “It’s a destruction of the instructional program,” she said.