Now a month into the school year, preliminary data from the Santa Barbara Unified School District, pulled on September 14, showed the district’s continued enrollment drop.
As of Monday, 11,406 students are enrolled in the district’s schools, according to a report presented to the school board on Tuesday. By comparison, six years ago, the district enrolled 12,877 students.
The district has seen declining enrollment across grade levels. Since 2015, enrollment has dropped by 17 percent districtwide. Notably, that includes a 21 percent drop at Santa Barbara High School and a 31 percent drop at Santa Barbara Community Academy. The shrinking elementary school may eventually merge with neighboring La Cumbre Junior High to form one TK-8 school.
Steve Venz, the district’s chief operating officer, previously told the Independent that two main reasons behind the drop are declining birth rates and rising living costs. Fewer people are having babies, and more people are leaving the area due to affordability.
“They’re not all going to private school,” Venz said, as in other parts of California. “They’re leaving the area.”
Enrollment affects staffing and budget decisions. While the district is community-funded — based on local property taxes — it does receive some state and federal funding based on the number of heads in the classroom, mainly for special education, which serves about 14 percent of students.
Right now, the district faces a multimillion-dollar budget deficit and $5.5 million in projected cuts.
However, Governor Gavin Newsom’s budget, passed in June, included $3 million in special education funds for Santa Barbara Unified. The state funding is meant to offset federal funding cuts from the Department of Education, and it will have one of the “biggest impacts” on the district’s budget, said Conrad Tedeschi, the district’s assistant superintendent of Business Services, at an August school board meeting.
Additionally, the district is receiving $10 million in grant funding for professional development, dual enrollment and career pathways, teacher recruitment and retention, and maintenance. The district must use these one-time funds by 2032.
One condition of this “Student Support and Professional Development” grant is that the district must host a special hearing to address declining enrollment. Accordingly, a study session on enrollment is scheduled for November, said Marianne Hew, assistant superintendent of Family and Student Services, during Tuesday’s meeting.
“We haven’t gotten to October yet, so our data for this year is unofficial, but we wanted to give you a quick update on where we are with our enrollment right now,” Hew told the board. She said that, as district staff plan for the study session in November, they will continue to review enrollment trends from the past and projections for the future.
