When Sarah Hillard first started teaching at Millennial Tech Middle a decade ago, she always rounded up enrollment to 500 students. Now, though, she usually rounds up to 400.
Like many schools across the county, Millennial Tech has far fewer students walking through the halls. Over the past decade, enrollment has dropped by about 19 percent.
“It’s definitely a big, noticeable difference,” Hillard said.
Fewer students mean less funding and fewer programs for students at Millennial Tech, which is tucked into the Chollas View neighborhood, near where state Route 94 and Interstate 805 meet. It also means fewer teachers.
The decline has also had a physical impact.
Millennial Tech is in the midst of a full-site renovation. The district is building a new administration center, and planning to start on a STEM facility next year. The district initially had plans to build a three-story building filled with classrooms.
Not anymore.
“As our enrollment declined, the building that was going to be three stories became two stories, became one story, became completely gone,” Hillard said. “It’s just kind of shocking. We lost an entire building with three floors of classrooms because we haven’t been able to maintain our enrollment.”
Millennial Tech is actually doing better than many schools.
Enrollment at Carmel Valley Middle in San Dieguito dropped by 54 percent. San Diego Unified’s Rodriguez Elementary has 53 percent fewer students than it did 10 years ago. Teofilo Mendoza, a South Bay Union school, is down 52 percent.
Countywide, there are now 27,004 fewer students in public schools than there were in 2014, a 5-percent decline.
The whole state is grappling with the trend. In 2024, there were 429,299 fewer students in California public schools than there were a decade ago, a 7-percent decline.
Locally, some districts have seen tiny declines, or even meaningful increases. Others have been hit by such precipitous declines that leaders have had to close schools.
Exactly how to respond is unclear, because many of the factors driving the trend – like shrinking birth rates statewide and the region’s sky-high cost of living – are out of the control of schools. But even as the rate of decline locally has slowed since a Covid-era peak, state officials project local schools could lose more than 110,000 students in the coming decades.
If those projections come true, the declines would reshape the landscape of public education in San Diego and lead to far fewer teachers and a whole lot more closed schools.
‘There Are Just Fewer Children’
For many years, it was hard to see the enrollment declines.
After enrollment peaked in 2018, county schools lost about 26,000 students from 2019 to 2022 alone. Some believed those drops were a response to Covid, as parents pulled their kids out of public schools and into other options.
But enrollment at local private schools has stayed relatively flat over the past decade. And while the number of parents choosing to homeschool their kids increased significantly over the pandemic, that increase comes nowhere close to accounting for the decline.
So where have the tens of thousands of students who used to fill the classrooms of local schools gone? They may no longer exist. Locals are having fewer kids than they used to and raising them here less frequently.
Alexander Alvarado is the education projectionist at California’s Department of Finance, which each year puts together projections of how enrollment will change in counties across the state. He’s seen one constant in recent years.
“Every time I do these projections, I get new birth projections and it’s kind of a running joke that they’re always lower than they were before,” Alvarado said.
Birth rates bear that out. Ever since the great recession of the late-aughts, Americans have been having fewer children. Last year, California’s birth rate sunk to its lowest point since 2000. San Diego County is no different. In 2024, San Diegans gave birth to 20 percent fewer children than in 2014.
The region’s increasing cost of living also has played a role.
Over the past decade, the cost of everything from housing to utilities has shot up. From 2019 to 2024 alone, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment increased by 41 percent. The average cost to buy a home has more than doubled in a decade.
The San Diego region has consistently ranked near the top of the most expensive places to live and those sky-high prices have chased some families away from the region in search of cheaper housing.
Nicole DeWitt, San Diego Unified’s deputy superintendent, said the affordability crisis has hit the district hard. Over the past decade, the district has lost about 16,000 students, a 12 percent decrease in enrollment.
Enrollment dropped especially fast during the pandemic, when DeWitt said many families moved to less expensive areas like Arizona, Nevada or Idaho. And it’s not just housing costs that have impacted families with kids, it’s also the high price, and low supply, of child care in the region that’s squeezed parents.
“The cost of living has continued to grow, especially in cities like San Diego, so, there are just fewer children within our boundaries than there were before,” DeWitt said. “That is an outside force that we don’t have any control over.”
It would be easier to point out the few places where enrollment isn’t declining than the many places where it is. Countywide, seven of every 10 public schools have fewer students than they did a decade ago. Of the county’s 43 districts, 36 of them have fewer students than a decade ago.
Still, the impact on districts has varied wildly. Enrollment at some districts like Borrego Springs or Dehesa Elementary has rocketed up, propelled by significant increases in the number of students attending charter schools they oversee. Warner Unified, for example, has seen a nearly 1,000-percent increase in enrollment over the past decade thanks to the charter schools it authorizes.
Those numbers tell a diverging, but related, story: over the past decade, enrollment at the county’s charter schools and district-run public schools have gone in the opposite direction.
Enrollment at district-run schools has decreased by nearly 53,000 students, or about 12 percent. Meanwhile, enrollment at charter schools has rocketed up about 41 percent, an increase of nearly 26,000 students. That increase is fueled in large part by the creation of two massive virtual schools.
Declining enrollment has already hit some local districts hard – many have even seen a double-digit decline. Many of those districts are located in wealthier coastal areas, like Del Mar, which has lost 20 percent of students, or Encinitas, which has lost 21 percent. Others are in more working-class communities, like National Elementary, which has seen a 25-percent decrease in enrollment, or Lemon Grove, which has seen a 22-percent decrease.
Take South Bay Union, which operates eleven elementary and middle schools in and around Imperial Beach.
Over the past decade, the district has lost a greater share of its students than pretty much any other in the county. Overall, enrollment has decreased by nearly 29 percent. When you exclude charter schools, the decline jumps to 37 percent.
South Bay Union Superintendent Jose Espinoza said the district is experiencing the same broad trends that districts across the county are seeing, it’s just happening at an accelerated rate.
Those striking losses have forced tough decisions in recent months. The district’s board in May approved a plan to close one elementary school at the end of the coming year. If enrollment continues to decline, and Espinoza believes it will, South Bay Union will close two more schools in the coming years.
But that decision didn’t come easily. For months, community members, staff and even students pushed hard against the plan, filling the district’s board rooms during meetings. That shouldn’t be a surprise, nobody likes seeing schools close, especially when it’s the one your child attends.
“If I’m being completely honest, had I known that that was the level of work that was needed here, I may have thought twice before taking this job,” Espinoza said.
South Bay Union leaders have worked hard to tailor school programs toward the specific needs of the community as a way to entice students back into their classrooms, Espinoza said. But the district is facing a couple of specific challenges that, like declining birth rates, they have very little ability to mitigate.
One is that while Imperial Beach was long viewed as the county’s last affordable beach community, an aging population of homeowners has shut young people out. Another anecdotal reason Espinoza’s heard is that the Tijuana River sewage crisis, and the pollution it has produced, has chased away families who are fearful of the ramifications on their children’s health. The district recently approved nearly half a million in funds to purchase air purifiers for classrooms, but that’s hardly a match for what some researchers have described as a “hazardous environment.”
“If I’m a family that’s living within my district and I can afford to relocate, I’m going to do that. I’m going to go somewhere else, where I perceive that it may be safer for my kids,” Espinoza said. “How are we supposed to solve that?”
On the surface, the past couple of years should have been encouraging. Rates of enrollment decline slowed significantly from their pandemic peak and in 2023 even ticked up slightly for the first time in five years.
But the worst may be yet to come, because all of that – the slowing, the increase – is artificial.
Over the past five years, California has been rolling out a new grade for 4-year-olds called universal transitional kindergarten, which brought a flood of new students who wouldn’t otherwise have been enrolled into districts across the state. That influx boosted overall enrollment but also served to hide the fact that enrollment was still dropping in pretty much every grade.
Last year was the final phase of the rollout, though, so districts will no longer receive the sugar rush of a brand-new cohort of students.
Laura Hill is a policy director and senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California who’s studied both enrollment issues and transitional kindergarten. She said some districts hope bringing children into their schools earlier may entice some families to keep their kids there, but at the end of the day there are still just fewer children overall.
“If you’re able to convince families to be a part of your district that otherwise wouldn’t have because of the wonderful program that they see at the TK level, it will be an improvement at the margins,” Hill said. “But it’s not going to be a permanent fix, because you’re just seeing kids a year earlier than you would have.”
The grim long-term outlook from the Department of Finance’s projections underscores that reality. Over the next decade, the agency projects the rate of decline will nearly double to 10.5 percent. That would mean the county would lose a further 50,185 students.
By 2044, it predicts San Diego County will lose an additional 61,844 students. If those numbers prove true, it will mean that between 2014 to 2044 enrollment at San Diego County schools will have dropped by around 28 percent. That would be a decline of 139,545 students.
Declines of that magnitude would inevitably lead to a whole lot more school closures. And, since school funding is tied to enrollment via attendance, it would also mean a whole lot fewer teachers.
But the department’s projections are just that – projections. The specifics haven’t always panned out, but the broad decline they’ve predicted has.
That’s been tough for some to wrap their heads around, said Alvarado. A lot of people assume that just because we’ve always grown in the past, that means we will continue to grow.
“But there’s nothing in the data that I’m seeing right now that that makes me think that we’ll be going back to a growth pattern anytime soon. It would take a big change in the birth rate or immigration,” Alvarado said.
What that means for districts is still unclear. Some, like San Diego Unified, have taken unorthodox steps to exert influence over underlying factors they’ve traditionally had very little control over. Leaders have pushed hard to create more than one thousand affordable housing units at unused properties across the district.
It would take a whole lot of projects like that to move the needle, and few local districts have the size, or the financial capacity, to take similar leaps. But what’s clear to educators like South Bay Union Superintendent Espinoza, is that all school leaders, and the communities they serve, need to face it.
“The first step is to accept this is happening,” Espinoza said. “Nobody’s making up these numbers. You can go into classrooms and go, ‘Wow. We used to have 700 students in this school. Now we have 300.’”
