South Bay Union School District leaders are planning for the future of the district as enrollment continues to decline. The district’s enrollment has dropped by more than 40% since 2011.
“This isn’t a South Bay problem of contracting enrollment. It is a nationwide problem,” PowerSchool consultant Zach Worthen told the school board on Thursday. “There are very few growing districts across the country.”
New data show enrollment continues to drop. District leaders built this year’s budget expecting 119 fewer students than last year. The district lost 150 students instead. That means an even greater reduction in state funding, said Assistant Superintendent Rigo Lara.
“And these are ongoing losses,” Lara said. “This isn’t money that's coming back.”
In May, the district’s school board voted to close Central Elementary School in Imperial Beach after this school year. They’ll soon decide where those students go next.
Worthen presented two possibilities to the board Thursday. One would send Central’s students to neighboring schools. The other would redraw school boundaries throughout the district to balance out the number of students at each campus.
The board will vote on the new school boundary maps on Wednesday.
District leaders are still deciding what to do with Central Elementary School’s building after the closure. Lara said they could start by leasing it and eventually turn it into workforce housing.
The district plans to close two other schools by 2031. Those two schools haven’t been chosen yet, but administrators have proposed Sunnyslope and Berry Elementary Schools.
Worthen also presented boundary maps for two school closures: Central and Sunnyslope. Like the first two scenarios, one had fewer changes while the other adjusted boundaries throughout the district.
Central is still the only school closing at the end of this school year, Superintendent José Espinoza said in an interview after the meeting.
“The board has to be able to look beyond that,” he said. “We could close the next three schools and we still have the capacity for the students that we’re serving.”
Board member Cheryl Quiñones asked whether the remaining schools could accommodate increased demand for transitional kindergarten. California schools now offer TK to all four-year-olds.
Worthen said TK enrollment remains lower than kindergarten enrollment throughout the state.
“There is a chance, certainly, that there is sort of a culture change in California about the concept of transitional kindergarten as the public school entry grade,” he said. “We're probably looking at a fairly similar service level now for at least the next 3 to 5 years, because we have reached full expansion and not seen transitional kindergarten reach kindergarten cohort sizes.”
Along with redrawing boundaries, Espinoza told the board that the district needs to focus on keeping the students it has.
“What's within our control? Well, the low birth rates, that's not within our control,” he said. “But the way that we serve the community, that is within our control.”
