Soquel Union Elementary, Scotts Valley Unified and Pajaro Valley Unified school districts had some of the steepest percentage declines through 2023. Enrollment rose at Mountain Elementary School District in the Santa Cruz Mountains and Pacific Elementary School District in Davenport.

The 6% drop in Santa Cruz County TK-12 public school enrollment from 2013 to 2023 is on par with a 6% statewide drop over the same time period, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

The declines can decrease class sizes, but they can also spell trouble for school funding based on average daily attendance. Fewer students often means reduced budgets, which can lead to fewer classes, staff layoffs and downsized services overall — as well as more competition for students among schools, according to Public Policy Institute research. Chronic absenteeism and staff pensions also weigh heavily on some school districts’ budgets. 

Pajaro Valley Unified, Santa Cruz County’s largest school district, shed the most students from  2016 to 2023. 

Some school districts’ enrollment dropped by larger percentages in that period. 

• Bonny Doon Union Elementary: -40.5%
• Soquel Union Elementary: -20.9%
• Scotts Valley Unified: -15.9%
• Pajaro Valley Unified: -15.7%
• San Lorenzo Valley Unified: -13.0%

“It impacts our staffing,” said Heather Contreras, superintendent of Pajaro Valley Unified. “And then services end up being reduced as you see your budget declining.” She said the district was looking to add technical career courses and take other creative measures to “make our schools more attractive to bring in more students.” 

Declining enrollment is bedeviling not just Santa Cruz, but much of the United States. Reports show that public school enrollment has fallen by about 1 million students nationwide over the past few years.

State trends

Coastal California has been particularly affected, with the Public Policy Institute showing that school enrollment plummeted by 15.2% in Greater Los Angeles and 8.2% in the San Francisco Bay Area from 2013 to 2023. Steeper declines are projected in those areas by 2033.

Parts of the Central Valley have had enrollment gains in recent years.

Enrollment declines statewide were especially pronounced during the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic. At that time, some parents — particularly those of younger kids — switched from public schools to private schools, which had different rules and more in-person instruction during the pandemic. Other families embraced homeschooling or moved.

“During Covid, a mass movement of people [left] California [for] other states,” Superintendent Contreras said.

Yet Covid has been only one factor. “Declining enrollment was already projected even without the pandemic,” said Julien Lafortune, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, who specializes in education and economics.

He said the birthrate in California has been falling for roughly the past 15 years, and more people have been leaving than arriving. For a while, it was mostly low- and middle-income earners departing for lower-cost places, Lafortune said. But since the Covid pandemic and the corresponding rise in remote jobs, high-income earners have been departing as well, he said.

The state’s net population declined from 2020 to 2023, but started trending upward again last year. California has had a “pretty flat population, right around the 40 million mark, and it’s also an aging population,” Lafortune said. Santa Cruz County’s population is also trending older.

A sign of “distance learning” at Santa Cruz High School in 2021. (Stephen Baxter — Santa Cruz Local file)

Enrollment increases

Of the 10 school districts in Santa Cruz County, enrollment rose at two districts since 2017: Mountain Elementary School District in the Santa Cruz Mountains and Pacific Elementary School District in Davenport. Both of these districts have only one small school with around 165 students each.

At the Bonny Doon Union Elementary School District’s lone school, enrollment has fallen by around 40% since 2016. It now has fewer than 100 students. Bonny Doon Elementary is funded primarily through local property taxes. Unlike most other schools, diminished enrollment therefore does not directly affect the school’s revenue, said Mike Heffner, the district’s superintendent and principal of Bonny Doon Elementary. 

He attributed his school’s enrollment decline largely to Covid and the slow pace of rebuilding following the CZU Lightning Complex fires. A smaller school has some advantages. “It provides the opportunity for a much higher degree of staff-to-student interaction,” Heffner said. “Our student-to-teacher and student-to-staff ratio is presently really strong.”

Heffner said that because there’s only one class per grade, the school has been trying to facilitate friendships across grade levels. “The smaller classes get, the smaller number of choices students have in their peer relationships,” he said. 

When enrollment falls, some schools may even be forced to merge or close. Not many California schools have closed so far. But those that did tended to serve a disproportionate number of low-income students and students who don’t speak English at home, according to the Public Policy Institute. 

“It can be hard to make some of these unpopular decisions,” Lafortune said. “There’s no easy solution.”

“Invest in our children,” a sign states in Spanish at a Feb. 12 Pajaro Valley Unified School District meeting. A plan to lay off some teachers and other staff stalled this month. (Fidel M. Soto – Santa Cruz Local)

Pajaro Valley Unified

Pajaro Valley Unified saw enrollment decline to 15,418 students in 2023 from 18,300 students in 2016, excluding charter schools. That’s about a 16% drop. Superintendent Contreras said the total number is expected to fall by an additional 600 students next year alone. The district has 35 schools, the majority of its students are Latino, and roughly 75% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch.

Schools can no longer rely on federal Covid relief funds. “We received $100 million in stimulus money,” Contreras said. “And those dollars are now spent.”

Contreras was heartened by the November passage of the Measure M bond measure that will bring in $315 million for school repairs and upgrades. For example, a long-awaited performing arts center at Pajaro Valley High School will now be built, Contreras said. 

Voters adopted similar bond measures in Bonny Doon Union, Scotts Valley Unified, and Soquel Union Elementary school districts. In Live Oak, a school bond measure was rejected. 

Santa Cruz County school districts. (Santa Cruz County Office of Education)

Soquel Union Elementary

At Soquel Union Elementary School District, which has four schools, enrollment dropped more than 20% from 2016 to 2023. 

“We just don’t have as many young families,” said Soquel Union Superintendent Scott Turnbull. “We want to attract students, we want to retain the families we have. At the same time, [students are] a diminishing resource. It’s disheartening.”

He said the families that leave are surveyed, and that it’s not the quality of the schools driving them away. “Generally speaking,” Turnbull said, “it’s for larger societal reasons, like cost of living.” He added, “Folks are moving to the Central Valley, places like that.”

Turnbull said it was important to make the district’s schools as competitive as possible. “We have a dual-language immersion program now that we just started three years ago,” Turnbull said. It was done for two reasons. “One, we believe in multilingualism, and, two, we didn’t want to lose any students to other districts because of a program that we didn’t have.”

Scotts Valley Unified

At Scotts Valley Unified School District, which has four schools, school enrollment has fallen to about 2,050 students this school year, compared with 2,505 students in 2016 – a drop of around 18%. Charter school enrollment in Scotts Valley increased from 2019 to 2023.

Scotts Valley Unified School Board President Roger Snyder said the declines have been blunted somewhat by expanded transitional kindergarten, or TK. “But we still see declines in our upper grades as families move out of the area to find more affordable housing and a lower cost of living,” Snyder wrote in an email.

Synder said enrollment declines and resultant reduced state funding, “hampers our ability to pay teachers fair, competitive salaries” and “limits our ability to offer more course variety for our students at the secondary level.” The district has, for example, reduced its foreign language offerings, Snyder wrote. 

“We try our best to minimize the effects on our students,” Snyder wrote. 

Cheryl Noble, parent of a middle schooler and an elementary school student in Scotts Valley, said she hasn’t noticed an impact to her kids so far from declining enrollment. But she noted they might have less choice of elective classes in high school.

“Anything we can do to increase enrollment benefits my kids and kids across the county,” she said. 

Santa Cruz City Schools

In the City of Santa Cruz, enrollment at the high schools and middle schools remained fairly steady from 2016 to 2023, declining 1.5%. But the elementary school enrollment dropped 20% during the same time period.

The district’s overall enrollment is expected to be relatively flat over the next decade, Santa Cruz City Schools Superintendent Kris Munro wrote in an email. Elementary school enrollment is projected to slightly increase next school year. She attributed this in part to the state-mandated housing construction goals.

“We are already seeing many families from the new housing projects that have been built downtown and on the Ocean Street corridor,” Munro wrote. 

She added that a new committee has been formed in the district to address declining enrollment.

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