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California public schools
Palo Alto Unified School District Annual Enrollment Number of enrolled students
ROUTE 1: PUBLIC
ROUTE 2: PRIVATE
ROUTE 3: HOMESCHOOL
12K
11K
10K
’18–’19
’19–’20
’20–’21
’21–’22
Source: California Department of Education
Michelle Koo
Public school enrollment declines as students move out of state, opt for other mediums of learning Chris Lee News Editor Since California’s admittance as the 31st state, it has served as a progressive model for public education. Schools became free for all students in 1867, California was one of the first states to pass a compulsory attendance law in 1874 and the Golden State enacted the Class Size Reduction Program in 1996, which aimed to have 20 or fewer students in kindergarten through third grade classrooms. These actions ultimately led to the state’s public school enrollment increasing by more than a million students—22%—between 1993 and 2004. However, recent trends have shown a reversal to this growth. Out of the state’s 58 counties, 53 experienced a decline in student populations during the COVID-19 pandemic, with public school enrollment falling 2% since the 2019–2020 school year. According to the California Department of Education, Bay Area
public schools have lost 6.5% of their students, with Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) seeing a 10.5% decrease in students since 2019.
Impacts on Enrollment Pandemic-era learning has led some students and their families to reconsider public schools. Junior Ella Holsinger, a student at the Castilleja School, attended Gunn for her freshman year before enrolling in private school as a sophomore. “The distance learning that Gunn did [at the end of] my freshman year was pretty sparse,” she said. “We didn’t have to go on Zoom calls and the asynchronous work didn’t benefit me at all. Ultimately, my family and I made the decision to go [to Castilleja] together.” According to Assistant Principal Courtney Carlomagno, public schools faced more barriers than private schools when it came to adapting throughout the pandemic. “Public schools are larger than most
private schools so sheer size can cause protocols to be larger to manage,” she said. Parents and students began to notice the different transition protocols offered by private and public schools, including their hybrid options and dates for full in-person instruction. “I went back to [in-person school] in Nov. 2020,” Holsinger said. “[At Castilleja,] we ended up going to a model where it was one week of online and one week of in-person which was amazing.” In contrast, PAUSD high school students were not offered a consistent in-person learning option until March 2021, in which they could choose to come on campus for two days of the week. Other students such as sophomore Zefan Feng chose to move to private schools for reasons outside of pandemic restrictions. “The student-teacher ratio was quite important,” he said. “There are around 40 kids per grade [at the Pinewood School] so we have more individual attention from the teachers. I think that it’s Enrollment—p.2