San Diego County Schools Must Prepare for Fewer Kids

The United States is the land of opportunity. Or at least it used to be.  

Income inequality has exploded. Americans are more debt-ridden than ever before. Young and working-class people are less likely to be able to afford a house – or even retire. It’s all fueled the pervasive fear that the gears of opportunity may have ground to a halt. That’s why nearly three in four American parents think their kids will be worse off financially than their parents.  

For many, it adds up to a harsh truth – Americans must acclimate to a future where they will have less than they’d hoped for, and less than their parents and grandparents had. 

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Schools, too, must begin to plan for a smaller future. In fact, they’re already living in it. 

Over the past decade, enrollment at San Diego County public schools has declined by about 27,000 students. Of the more than 700 schools around 10 years ago, 71 percent have fewer students than they used to.  

That’s a problem for districts because enrollment is tied to funding, meaning the fewer students a school has, the higher the likelihood staff will get laid off. In some serious cases, schools may even be closed. 

Some people instinctively reach for answers that confirm their ideological priors. The assumption that parents are ditching woke, failing public schools for better options is perhaps the most popular one. But the answer is actually far simpler – there are just fewer kids.  

There are a whole lot of reasons for that reality, but two of the primary ones relate directly back to that decrease in opportunity.  

For one, rising costs have increasingly pushed San Diegans out of the region. Last year, 24,000 people moved away and the only thing that saved the county from a population decline was an influx of immigrants.  

The other main factor is something countries throughout the world are grappling with – declining birth rates. The number of births in San Diego County in 2024 was nearly 30 percent lower than the number of births in 1990. For many couples, the answer why is simple: it’s just too expensive to raise a child. 

These are not simple predicaments, but rather society wide crises. What happens when cities shrink? What happens when there are fewer people to hold up the commitments made by previous generations? Unfortunately for schools, they are on the front lines of these shifts.  

New enrollment projections from California’s Department of Finance released in October actually include a rare bit of good news on this front. The revised numbers project that in 2045, San Diego County’s public schools will have nearly 25,000 more students than an earlier projection predicted. 

Still, that bit of good news only changes things on the margins. If that projection comes to pass, between 2014 and 2044, the county will have lost about 115,000 students. That would be the equivalent of the cities of Del Mar, Solana Beach, Coronado, Lemon Grove and Poway disappearing from the map. 

So, what do schools do in the face of the precipitous enrollment decline to come?  

Some districts like Lemon Grove Schools have taken to streamlining their enrollment process and hitting the streets to preach the gospel of their schools. Superintendent Marianna Vinson has said it’s helped. Others, like Sweetwater Union, have begun to lean into already popular programs, hoping to draw in students whose parents may have sent their kids somewhere other than the local public school. 

But like that projection revision, the reality is many of these efforts will likely only help at the margins. Even if schools lure some kids away from private schools or other options, there will still be fewer kids. No amount of systems streamlining will create two kids out of one.  

Still other districts, like San Diego Unified, are shooting even bigger. Some leaders, like newly-minted Board President Richard Barrera, hope to one day expand their nascent affordable education workforce housing projects to include housing for families.  

“I really see this eventually as part of a solution to declining enrollment,” Barrera said. “I think we’re going to be able to get to a scale where we’re not just building affordable housing for employees, we’re building affordable housing for families in our district.” 

For many smaller districts, that sort of ambitious effort may be out of reach. Even for a behemoth like San Diego Unified, the second-largest district in California, the theory is built on a series of hypotheticals. No district has attempted to build the amount of workforce housing as the district, let alone scaled housing production to include units set aside for families. So, it’s not clear that such grandiose efforts would impact enrollment as Barrera hopes. 

Instead, the future many districts may wake up in will likely look more like that of South Bay Union.  

Over the past decade, the number of students enrolled in the district’s schools has dropped by nearly 30 percent. That’s why the board voted to close three schools over the next three years. Those are decisions that don’t earn anyone fans, but unfortunately, they’re necessary to keep districts fiscally above water. San Diego Unified is already projecting a $47 million budget deficit – something officials blame partly on declining enrollment. 

But in order to make these kinds of decisions responsibly and mitigate the number of times you have to make them, districts need to be thinking long-term. That means analyzing enrollment and demographic data and building strategies to keep on top of decline districtwide and at individual sites. 

Leaders at districts like San Diego Unified, for example, have insisted they have it all under control, but that can sometimes be hard to believe. Despite long having employed a dedicated demographer, the district no longer has one – and hasn’t for years. And as I reported a couple of months ago, district officials don’t even know how many students each of their schools can fit.  

How do you know how many schools are underenrolled if you don’t know how many students each school can fit? And how do you start to take steps to remedy underenrollment if you don’t know which schools are underenrolled?  

These questions aren’t fun to ask. They’re even less fun to answer. But districts countywide need to be prepared to ask and answer them, just as they must prepare for a future with fewer kids. Whether they like it or not.  

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