LA Unified Enrollment to Drop Below 400,000 in 2 Years: Officials

Students walk to their classrooms at a public middle school in Los Angeles on Sept. 10, 2021. Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images

LOS ANGELES—Enrollment for the nation’s second-largest school district, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)—is down by 40 percent, from 747,000 students in 2003 to 437,000 this year. District officials project the district may continue to face steep enrollment declines in the coming years.

Contrast that with 20 years ago, when LAUSD was so populated, it had to offer year-round classes for some students.

In a March 8 report (pdf) before the LAUSD education board, officials predicted enrollment would begin to drop by about 4 percent each year over the next decade—reaching below 400,000 in just two years. The district previously saw an enrollment decline rate of about 2 percent in the past five years.

Because state funding is based on enrollment, several schools in the district are facing the possibility of closing, merging, or downsizing based on enrollment numbers.

LAUSD Chief Financial Officer David Hart said during the presentation that the board intends to look into the declining enrollment numbers to “understand what is transpiring with regards to a reduction in our enrollment.”

The report indicated that new charter schools operating in district boundaries may impact the district’s enrollment.

There are currently more than 270 active charter schools with over 112,000 students enrolled in LAUSD, according to the state’s education department.

In addition, charter schools in the district have seen an enrollment increase of about 1 percent per year since 2018, according to EdData.

Despite an expected drop in overall enrollment, the district is expecting an increase in students switching to online study programs as the district expects to enforce a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for students at the beginning of the 2022–2023 school year.

Under the mandate, unvaccinated students would no longer be allowed to attend on-campus classes.

About 87 percent of LAUSD students over the age of 12 were vaccinated as of December 2021, meaning potentially more than 34,000 students remain unvaccinated.

Parents of those students will be faced with a choice: go online or leave the district.

“We anticipate [online learning program] enrollment increasing, not decreasing, so it does cause us to think about planning in a different way,” LAUSD Chief of Schools David Baca said at a board meeting in early February.

LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho—who took office last month—said he was “less concerned” about charter schools’ impacting enrollment, choosing instead to focus on expanding school choice in the district.

“I’m less concerned about the dynamic of dialogue that usually separates people into two camps: charter versus non-charter,” Carvalho told EdSource last week. “I’m more interested in programmatic offerings that benefit kids—period.”

The superintendent announced last month the district intends to open six new independent online learning programs to accommodate up to 15,000 students who are unable to attend classes in person or prefer remote learning, as well as unvaccinated students, who will no longer be allowed on campus after the start of the next school year.

The City of Angels online learning program—the district’s only long-term independent study program this year—saw enrollment increase more than 10 times, from almost 1,500 students last school year to more than 17,000 students this school year, according to Baca.

A spokesperson for the LAUSD Board of Education, as well as a spokesperson for the California Charter Schools Association, didn’t respond to requests for comment by press time.