{"id":630,"date":"2026-06-12T20:32:19","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T20:32:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sanfranciscomovingguide.com\/?p=630"},"modified":"2026-06-12T20:32:19","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T20:32:19","slug":"californias-schools-are-emptying-out-experts-say-its-only-going-to-get-worse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sanfranciscomovingguide.com\/?p=630","title":{"rendered":"California’s schools are emptying out. Experts say it’s only going to get worse."},"content":{"rendered":"
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The first sign was the empty desks that slowly started to appear.<\/p><\/div>

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Then there were fewer kindergartners in San Francisco.\u00a0Shrinking graduating classes in San Jose. An Oakland elementary school that lost so many students it was forced to close.<\/p>

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Across California, signs like these have proliferated as what once looked like isolated enrollment dips have quietly turned into something much bigger: a demographic transformation that\u2019s now reshaping public education across the country. Year after year, class rosters get shorter until they\u2019re impossible to ignore.<\/p><\/div>

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\u201cIt\u2019s been on the downward trend since I started. It\u2019s never been drastic from one year to the next, but when you add up the numbers \u2026 that adds up over time,\u201d William Chavez, a social studies teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School in Los Angeles, told SFGATE.<\/p><\/div>

Just this school year, California\u2019s kindergarten through 12th grade public schools enrolled nearly 75,000 fewer students than the year before, according to state data. And over the past decade, California has 420,000 fewer public school students, according to the Public Policy Institute of California, which means less money for the public school system. Driven by a range of factors including lower birth rates, families moving to more affordable areas and immigration crackdowns, the declines are spreading to inner cities, suburbs, rural communities and even fast-growing areas across the country that once seemed immune to demographic slowdown (even Texas, which has drawn California transplants, enrolled 76,000 fewer students in the 2025-26 school year than the prior year).<\/p><\/div>

\u201cThis is happening everywhere. \u2026 There are very few districts that aren\u2019t experiencing it,\u201d Michael Kirst, a professor emeritus at Stanford University and former president of the California State Board of Education, told SFGATE.<\/p><\/div>

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For California school districts already struggling with budget deficits, labor costs and lingering pandemic learning loss, the enrollment drop is exacerbating these problems, and researchers say the decline looks like it\u2019ll be the new normal.<\/p><\/div>

Where are the students?<\/h2><\/div>

Education researchers say the biggest driver behind shrinking schools is that Americans are having fewer children. Birth rates in the United States have been on a steady decline since 2007, data from the , and the effects of the drop are now becoming visible in the public school system.<\/p><\/div>

\u201cThe thing is with public school enrollment, it operates on a lag,\u201d\u00a0Julien Lafortune, a researcher with the PPIC, told SFGATE. \u201cThe kids in kindergarten now were born five, six years ago.\u201d<\/p><\/div>

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According to the \u00a0there were 3.6 million U.S. births in 2025, a 16% drop from the recorded in 2007. The domino effect in the nation\u2019s education system has resulted in fewer and fewer students each year. And when COVID-19 hit, it just accelerated a problem that officials had long foreseen. \u00a0 \u00a0<\/p><\/div>

\u201cBefore the pandemic, the state Department of Finance had predicted declines that would come over the next decade or two,\u201d Pedro\u00a0Noguera, dean of the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education, told SFGATE.<\/p><\/div>

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there was a historic 2.7% decrease in enrollment at the start of the fall 2020 school year across the country and a 0.2% drop in the teacher to student ratio, except in Nevada, Florida and Ohio.<\/p><\/div>

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For a while, districts hoped the declines, driven by\u00a0homeschooling, private schools or families delaying kindergarten during the chaos of the pandemic, were temporary and that enrollment would eventually rebound. But researchers say the data no longer supports that explanation.<\/p><\/div>

\u201cStatewide, private and\u00a0homeschooling didn\u2019t seem to explain a big chunk of the enrollment declines,\u201d Noguera said. \u201cA lot of it seems to really be about this underlying demographic trend.\u201d<\/p><\/div>

Now, PPIC\u2019s Lafortune said the declining birth rates and subsequent enrollment need to be recognized as the new normal.<\/p><\/div>

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\u201cWe\u2019re not really in the shadow of the pandemic anymore,\u201d\u00a0Lafortune said. \u201c\u2026 It\u2019s not suddenly private schools siphoning all this enrollment away.\u201d<\/p><\/div>

Why the Bay Area and urban cities are being hit hard<\/h2><\/div>

A recent\u00a0PPIC report on declining enrollment found nearly two-thirds of California districts lost students over the past year, with some of the steepest declines concentrated in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and coastal California. Public school enrollment in the Bay Area has dropped by 10.4% since 2015 and is expected to decline another 9.7% through 2035.<\/p><\/div>

Stanford\u2019s Kirst said a primary driver of the drop is that younger families increasingly cannot afford to live in cities like San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, pushing many inland or out of state entirely. The trend has illustrated how California\u2019s affordability crisis is colliding with demographic decline.<\/p><\/div>

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\u201cCalifornia has an added problem of the cost of housing, which is especially high in urban areas,\u201d\u00a0Kirst said. \u201cFamilies with children can\u2019t afford to live there.\u201d<\/p><\/div>

Lafortune also said the pattern reflects \u201caffordability issues\u201d because many people are moving away from the Bay Area to Sacramento and the Central Valley.<\/p><\/div>

The populations in these regions are booming, and schools are seeing higher enrollments, with a 4.1% increase since 2015 in the San Joaquin Valley and a 4.6% increase in the Sacramento metro area, according to the PPIC report. The northern Central Valley had the biggest enrollment boom, with a 5.5% increase, and in the Fresno and Clovis area, a new school recently opened with a $600 million price tag to accommodate the large number of students.<\/p><\/div>

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Still, even in the areas currently experiencing growth, experts say the trend is unlikely to continue indefinitely. The\u00a0PPIC report projected that over the next decade, no region in California will experience long-term increasing enrollment.<\/p><\/div>

\u201cIt looks like just about every region will experience at least some level of decline,\u201d\u00a0Noguera said. \u201cOr probably not as much growth.\u201d<\/p><\/div>

The affordability crisis is not only taking students out of urban school districts but is also putting a damper on the students who stay,\u00a0Chavez said. Even for the families who remain at schools with declining enrollment, soaring housing costs can create instability that affect students\u2019 learning.<\/p><\/div>

\u201cStudents are leaving and the ones who are here we are trying to support,\u201d he said. \u201c\u2026 We see it in the classroom when there\u2019s very little motivation to learn, which is completely understandable. When a student doesn\u2019t know where they\u2019re going to sleep the next evening, how can I expect them to learn whatever topic we\u2019re studying?\u201d<\/p>

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Trends in the state\u2019s large multilingual and immigrant population are also playing an outsized role. As U.S. President Donald Trump has cracked down on immigration enforcement this year, anxious families are deciding whether to even send their children to school.<\/p><\/div>

\u201cThere are bigger declines among English learner students,\u201d\u00a0Lafortune said.<\/p><\/div>

A separate\u00a0PPIC analysis on multilingual enrollment declines found California lost about 372,000 multilingual learners between 2015 and 2023.\u00a0\u201cOur population has a big share of immigrants or people born outside of the United States, and so we\u2019re more sensitive in that sense to changes in immigration,\u201d Lafortune said.<\/p><\/div>

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Noguera echoed that sentiment, saying that those immigration shifts have become increasingly important because California schools historically depended on immigrant families to sustain enrollment growth.<\/p><\/div>

Closures, layoffs and political fights<\/h2><\/div>

Because school funding is closely tied to attendance and enrollment, shrinking classrooms can quickly spiral into budget crises. Districts facing long-term declines are increasingly confronting layoffs, hiring freezes and school closures, such as the San Francisco Unified District, which is operating with a\u00a0multimillion dollar budget deficit. <\/p><\/div>

A report by\u00a0Noguera and Alvin Makori on shrinking enrollment from Getting Down to Facts, an independent research project out of Stanford University, revealed that 630 California schools have closed since 2015. The report argues that enrollment decline has become \u201ca governance problem\u201d for districts forced into politically painful decisions about which campuses survive. \u00a0<\/p><\/div>

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In March, for example, the San Jose Unified School District decided to close five schools. Families in the district alleged that the schools the district chose to close will disproportionately affect minority students.<\/p><\/div>

\u201cSchool closures are always very controversial,\u201d\u00a0Kirst said. Kirst also noted that in some neighborhoods, such as the area by USC where he works, schools built during California\u2019s postwar population boom are now operating far below capacity.<\/p><\/div>

\u201cWithin 2 miles of [USC] there are probably seven high schools, all of which are vastly underenrolled, built for over 2,000 students, and none of them have more than 500 now,\u201d Kirst said.<\/p><\/div>

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The closures also directly affect its educators,\u00a0Chavez added. He said the Los Angeles Unified School District\u2019s staffing, like most district budgets across the state, is tied to enrollment. Fewer students then results in budget cuts and fewer teachers.<\/p><\/div>

\u201cWe\u2019re talking people who have taken their time and energy to build relationships with our students and then they\u2019re no longer there,\u201d he said. \u201cA concerning thing is you\u2019re going to see a lot of good educators, people who are in this with their hearts, leave the profession.\u201d<\/p><\/div>

Lafortune said districts that proactively prepare for decline, rather than waiting for fiscal emergencies, may ultimately fare better academically and politically. He pointed to Napa County, which framed consolidation around investing more deeply in remaining students rather than simply cutting costs. Education officials created mental health services and wellness centers for high school students, for example.<\/p><\/div>

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\u201cThey really tried to frame it as: we\u2019re closing a school, but we\u2019re using the savings to do more,\u201d he said. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t about doing less.\u201d<\/p><\/div>

A strange upside<\/h2><\/div>

Buried inside the enrollment crisis is one unexpected benefit from the decline: Fewer students could eventually mean more resources per child if state education funding remains stable. The challenge, though, is deciding what to do with those resources.<\/p><\/div>

\u201cWhat\u2019s the right way to actually use that money?\u201d\u00a0Lafortune said.<\/p><\/div>

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Policymakers and school leaders will have to make difficult choices about whether they should preserve aging school systems or consolidate campuses and invest more aggressively in tutoring, smaller class sizes and academic recovery.<\/p><\/div>

Currently, the funding for public schools remains unpredictable. The latest 2026-27 budget proposal from\u00a0Gov. Gavin Newsom calls for less money for education, temporarily withholding $3.9 billion voter-approved education funds, prompting concerns from educators and administrators.<\/p><\/div>

Schools throughout the country have also lost federal relief funds, which varied between state and district, but helped the campuses survive the pandemic woes. In March 2025, the U.S. Department of Education rescinded more than $2.5 billion in funds that were helping close budget shortfalls exacerbated by COVID-19. Chavez said even his district, which is the second-largest in the country, receives an \u201cextended amount\u201d of resources but officials need to think deeper.<\/p><\/div>

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\u201cThat\u2019s like a Band-Aid. The funding is essential and it\u2019s still not getting to what I believe is the root cause, which is affordability and lack of affordable housing in the city,\u201d he said.<\/p><\/div>

Higher education could be next<\/h2><\/div>

Experts say the demographic slide likely will not stop at K-12 schools.<\/p><\/div>

Elite institutions like Stanford University,\u00a0UC Berkeley and UCLA are unlikely to struggle for applicants anytime soon because of their international prestige and massive applicant pools, but the outlook is far murkier for schools that rely more heavily on local and regional student pipelines. Last year, Sonoma State University, Cal State East Bay and San Francisco State University announced they would combine certain operational services amid painful budget cuts brought by shrinking enrollment.<\/p><\/div>

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\u201cThe elite big schools like\u00a0USC and UCLA won\u2019t feel it now,\u201d Kirst said. \u201cBut you\u2019re seeing many Cal States and community colleges already experience it.\u201d<\/p><\/div>

That pressure is already emerging across parts of California\u2019s public higher education system as the number of high school graduates slowly shrinks. According to a 2024 analysis from the\u00a0Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, a nonprofit research organization, the number of high school graduates was expected to peak in 2025 and then decline by 13%, or nearly half a million, through 2041 because of fewer births throughout the country.<\/p><\/div>

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