San Diego Unified Doesn’t Know How Many Students Each School Can Fit

After months of asking San Diego Unified officials how many students each district run-school can serve, they finally came back with an answer – they don’t know.  

Let me rewind. 

Over the past decade, San Diego County schools have lost tens of thousands of students to declining birth rates and the region’s high cost of living. San Diego Unified alone lost nearly 14,000, an about 13 percent decline.  

Earlier this year, I wrote a series of stories that explored just how impactful those declines have been and will likely continue to be. State officials project that the declines will continue decades into the future, leaving already shrunken schools smaller still. 

As I was working on those stories, I kept asking myself one question: how many San Diego Unified schools are underenrolled?  

It’s an important question for a whole bunch of reasons, not least of which is because it could shed light on if there are district schools so underenrolled they’re at risk of closure. San Diego Unified officials have told me this isn’t something being considered, but earlier this year we saw officials at South Bay Union take the drastic step in response to plummeting enrollment. 

To understand how underenrolled schools are, though, you first need to know how many kids each of these schools can fit. So, I asked. For weeks, I didn’t receive a straight response. But on Monday, district officials sent me a statement. 

In it, Marceline Sciuto, San Diego Unified’s executive director of operations support, wrote that figuring out capacity “is not a simple formula-based process.” Instead, it’s a complex equation based on a slew of factors, chief of which are what sorts of programs – from athletics to before- and after-school-care and everything in between – a school offers.  

Additionally, district officials calculate capacity one school at a time, and only when the figure is needed, she wrote. That can be when leaders add a new educational program, when they build new facilities or even when charter school officials submit a request to use facilities at a district-run school. 

Then came the kicker: “A districtwide capacity report as requested does not currently exist, and producing one of this magnitude for a single point in time would exceed existing staff and resource capacity,” Sciuto wrote.  

What she’s saying here isn’t just that San Diego Unified officials don’t know how many students fit into each of their schools, but also that they aren’t capable of producing these figures districtwide.  

It makes sense that a school’s capacity is a more dynamic figure than the maximum occupancy plaques mandated by state and local fire officials. Wrangling all of the data needed to make capacity determinations at every one of the district’s more than 170 schools also seems challenging. What is much more difficult to believe is that calculating the figures would exceed the “staff and resource capacity,” of a district with a close to $2 billion budget.

Board President Cody Petterson is much less skeptical.

“There are enough questions involved (with determining capacity) that, if one of my colleagues is like ‘I want an analysis of all 175 sites,’ I would say ‘That’s asking way too much of staff,’” Petterson said.

That’s especially true since last year’s budget cuts, Petterson said. The cuts focused on central office staff as opposed to laying off teachers.

“I am frankly concerned that you have a district office that is pushed to its limits,” he said.

Still, other, much larger districts have produced such figures. Chicago Public Schools, for example, manage more than 500 schools. An investigation by ProPublica and Chalkbeat found that about 30 percent of the district’s schools are at least half-empty and 47 served fewer than one-third of the students they were capable of educating. What’s more is that officials at Chicago Public Schools don’t seem to be doing anything about those severely underenrolled schools.

That’s not great.  

No one wants schools to close. It’s wildly unpopular not only for the students and staff of schools, but also for the broader community a school serves. But the costs associated with severely underenrolled schools are high. They still have to pay for more fixed costs, like principals and electricity and maintenance staff, but they don’t have the economies of scale that larger schools have that help spread out those fixed costs. 

The ProPublica and Chalkbeat team found that while Chicago Public Schools spend about $18,700 per student districtwide, the cost at some of its most underenrolled schools reaches as high as $93,000 per student. Those funds are, in essence, being denied to the rest of the students in the district. 

That $93,000 per student school is an extreme example. Last year, it served only 28 students. There’s no traditional district-run school in San Diego Unified that serves that few students. There are, however, some schools that have been hit especially hard by enrollment decline that now serve nearly half of the students they did just a decade ago. 

What that means in the future, though, as enrollment continues to be squeezed by declining birth rates and high cost of living, is unclear. But officials need to think deeply about these crises. Students’ education, and district staff, depend on them to make thoughtful, difficult decisions in the years ahead. 

But what’s also unclear is the scale of the crisis – or if there is one at all. Just how many schools are underenrolled? And how underenrolled are they? 

To take a page out of district officials’ book, I don’t know.  

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