The state’s K-12 enrollment has fallen sharply again this year, by a about 110-thousand students, pushing total public school enrollment in California below six million for the first time since 1999-2000.
EdSource reports that the 1.8 percent enrollment decline – on top of the 2.6 percent record drop in 2020-21– is a combined loss of 271,000 students since Covid struck in spring 2020. Enrollment as of Census Day, always the first Wednesday of October, was 5.8 million students this year; five years ago, it was 6.2 million.
The decline includes charter school enrollment, which dropped for the first time year-to-year in two decades.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the San Francisco Unified School District saw the most significant decline in student enrollment statewide, losing more than 25-hundred students. The decrease more than doubles the number from the previous year, which saw schools closed during the beginning of the pandemic.
The district has lost about 36-hundred students in the past two years. And It also marks the first time in decades that San Francisco Unified has seen its enrollment fall below 49-thousand students.
