I’ve noticed these battles playing out piecemeal in places like San Francisco, but school districts across the country are facing the same problem. There are fewer students enrolling in public schools and that means school budgets and staffing are outsized for the job that needs to be done.
Responsible leaders would seek to reduce the size of the staff and the number of schools, but teachers unions and parents often oppose those changes. The result is school districts like the one in San Francisco that delay the inevitable and wind up spending far more than they should be. Many other urban districts are seeing the same dynamic play out.
As American women have fewer babies each year, the number of young children in the United States is dwindling. The trend is now catching up to the nation’s public school districts.
There are simply fewer children to attend school in America today: The number of public school students in kindergarten through 12th grade has fallen in 30 states since the mid-2010s…
Declining enrollment has hit many of the nation’s largest urban school districts, including Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, a New York Times analysis found. But smaller and suburban districts are shrinking at a similar rate.
Fewer students means less funding, which is tied to enrollment numbers. Many districts are now facing painful budget cuts — and heated conversations about whether to close schools.
There’s more than one factor playing into this in big cities. The pandemic led to a lot of people working from home and some of them decided they could do that just as well in the suburbs as in the more expensive city. And families with children may have been especially prone to moving, both because suburbs are often safer and because families that need more space can get it at a better price.
But the big issue is the fertility rate. There are simply a lot less children than there were two decades ago.
…experts say the biggest factor in declining enrollment is the record-low U.S. fertility rate. It most recently peaked in 2007, and has fallen 24 percent since then.
As children in that age cohort grow up — many babies born in 2007 graduated from high school in 2025 — there are fewer students to replace them. Projections from the National Center for Education Statistics, a research arm of the Department of Education, suggest that enrollment will keep falling in coming years.
Another factor playing a role is immigration. The huge surge during President Biden’s term brought in hundreds of thousands of children who wound up scattered around the US in public schools. Now those numbers are dropping.
In Denver, school enrollment started to decline in 2020, the result of years of lower birthrates and high costs that pushed families out of the city. But then a surge in immigration between 2022 and 2024 brought several thousand new children to Denver’s schools, reversing the trend…
At Ashley Elementary School in Denver, which offers instruction in both English and Spanish, enrollment more than doubled to almost 400 students, from 175. Now, it is back down to 250, as migrant families dispersed elsewhere in the United States or returned to their home countries.
Long term the only solution is closing schools and laying off teachers. But in places like San Francisco, that often doesn’t happen until the budget situation becomes dire. SF actually lost control of its budget. In 2024, the state stepped in when the city refused to make changes.
Late last week, two fiscal experts — appointed a few years ago to give guidance to the district — were authorized to suspend or reverse financial decisions made by the superintendent or school board. It’s an extreme action the state superintendent of public instruction can take when a district is in a “distressed financial condition.”…
The school board spent Tuesday night reviewing the new reality, with state advisers and other fiscal experts detailing the stark financial situation and what it will take to dig out of the hole. They urged district leaders to enact an immediate hiring freeze, which Wayne agreed to enforce. State officials, who met with Wayne last week, acknowledged the district has been cooperative and is responding to requests more quickly…
This moment has arguably been a long time coming. The district has been overspending for years, failing to adjust for declining enrollment and relying on a flush state budget, savings and pandemic recovery funds to make ends meet.
That was two years ago but efforts to close schools are still ongoing in SF and were making news there just last week.
San Francisco schools will revamp its loathed student assignment lottery system and consider closures by fall 2030 under a new plan to address two of the district’s most contentious issues…
After previous efforts to initiate closures failed under previous leadership, [Superintendent Maria] Su has spent the last 18 months getting the district ready for these massive changes and address the 14,000 empty seats in schools…
Efforts to close or merge sites, which have led to protests, petitions and even hunger strikes, have increased across California in recent years as districts grapple with declining enrollment and significant budget deficits as the state budget waned and pandemic recovery funds dried up.
Bureaucracies headed by powerful unions do not like to shrink. But this is going to be repeated nationwide probably for the next several decades as the U.S. population continues to decline. The U.S. fertility rate hit a record low last year.
