by David M. Greenwald
For several years I have been warning that without a change to how the community grows going forward, we are facing a loss of quality of life and it will be harder to maintain our roads, our infrastructure and our schools—all huge assets to our community.
Sure enough, on Thursday the school board received a presentation showing declining enrollment, specifically of the resident student population over the next few 
years.
The report by Davis Demographics & Planning, Inc. found that “DJUSD will continue to have a declining resident student population.”
They note: “Over the years, DJUSD has been able to mitigate the impact of the decline from an increase in non-resident (out of district) student enrollment, maintaining a fairly level enrollment over the last 10 years.”
A big finding: “Future resident kindergarten population will be near pre-pandemic levels and then decline due to continued decrease in area birth and aging population.”
Even with that: “Enrollment is still expected to decline overall in the next five years.”
Among the key observations, first, average births have dropped from 623 to 467 over a period of 20 years from 2000 to 2019. While there was a small increase in births in 2015 and 2016, 2019 saw the lowest area births in 20 years. A lot of this is about demographics.
Second, there is a lack of new housing—especially for families. While there are over 800 city-approved residential units planned within the next five years, “75% are apartments that typically do not house school age children.” Most are designated as student housing. While the report perhaps discounts the potential for the apartments to free up single family homes, the lack of housing currently planned beyond the currently approved units weighs heavily on this.
“Total enrollment has been fairly level over the last 10 years,” they found, but “resident student population (is) declining)” with “increased IDT’s (helping) mask decline.”
Davis Demographics predict that there will be a recovery of students as in-person learning resumes but a “continued decline of resident students,” while inter-district transfers (IDTs) increase.
Does this matter? School finance is complex, but the basic problem that we have attempted to show is that declining enrollment puts a huge strain on a school budget because of reverse economies of scale. Former DJUSD Business Associate Superintendent Bruce Colby used to estimate that the district would only save about 40 cents on the dollar for each declining student while it costs them their full ADA (average daily attendance)—roughly $10,000 (or more) per year.
As many know and as indicated, the district has stabilized its student population somewhat through out of district transfers. This has become controversial in some circles—largely, I would argue, because they don’t understand the economics of school finance and the concept of reverse economies of scale.
Basically, as most understand, as you increase in size, the incremental cost per unit goes down—whereas as you decrease in size, the incremental cost per unit goes up. That means that when you lose attendance, you are fighting two problems—one, you lose your per-pupil ADA money for every student you lose, and the second is that the cost of educating the remaining students goes incrementally up.
Declining enrollment is generally the enemy of districts because it decreases the budget and, as former Superintendent of Business Services Bruce Colby explained to me, you can’t shed enough costs to offset the loss in ADA money.
Or to counter a prevailing sentiment on our comment board, you can’t right size a district because there really is no equilibrium.
As Amari Watkins, Colby’s replacement, said on Thursday, “The three main factors affecting enrollment are birth rates, mobility of resident students and local housing growth.”
Birth rate is definitely going down across the state, but the bigger problem in Davis is that we have an aging population. (The article in the Enterprise this week is a bit misleading, Davis has a younger population if you factor in the number of students, but students are not staying here to marry and have children that attend schools).
A big factor then is the lack of local housing growth coupled with the increased cost of housing that is forcing the younger demographic that would have children to live elsewhere.
Watching the enrollment figure, therefore, is a leading indicator of what is happening with our demographic.
Right now, as Superintendent John Bowes noted, “We have been bringing in students on inter-district transfer to help shore up declining enrollment.”
But that may not last forever. Scott Torlucci, a senior project manager at Davis Demographics, in response to a question from Vigdis Asmundson warned that there is a real possibility that interest in inter-district transfers will be saturated at some point.
He did say, “You guys have a spigot and as long as you keep it open I believe you have enough people in the area that are going to want to join and come to Davis Joint Unified School District.”
The majority of the transfers are students with UC Davis-affiliated parents. But again, keep in mind, one reason we are seeing a lot of that is that those people used to live in Davis—now more and more, even on a faculty salary, they can’t afford to.
But in the meantime, the decline in enrollment looks to continue. And unless we are concerned about the changes in the demographics of this community, that is not going to stop.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
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Typical.
“Morning thoughts”, pointing out an “area of concern” (apparently personal concern), yet not even hinting of ways to resolve the issues of concern. Guessing you expect others to find ‘solutions’ to your personal concerns.
Typical… you are far from alone in that approach… all too prevalent for the last few decades…
It is no concern of ours, directly, personally, if there were zero school-aged kids attending DJUSD, and DJUSD was closed down completely.
Now, lets move forward with some constructive ideas that might lead to solving/mitigating your personal concerns, David, and finding some ‘common ground’.
Staff and faculty employment at UCD has increased substantially over the last decade. Those buying homes are living in Woodland and Dixon, both of which are in a housing boom (homes in the new subdivision on the southwest side of Dixon are pre-selling as fast as they’re being offered). Those parents in both cities will continue to be very likely to seek to transfer their students to DJUSD. I don’t see an enrollment crisis for the Davis schools.
But this is a useful metric for how the city is getting older and younger and losing the middle. I guess that’s ok with most Davis voters. The only thing that would change it is annexing raw land and building a new subdivision of single-family homes with yards. I don’t think there are any builders willing to go through the process involved in bringing that about in this town.
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Don is correct that UCD staff and faculty with school age children living in Woodland and Dixon and elsewhere are going to be likely to seek to transfer their students to DJUSD, but applying for such a transfer is only part of the process. The other part of the process is getting formal approval from their “home” school district in support of the transfer. If that “sending” school district does not give their approval of the transfer, the transfer can not legally go forward.
Given the fact that all school districts are feeling the effects of declining birth rates, enrollment concerns exist for almost all school districts, and if their school facilities have room, they will want the per-pupil ADA money from the State just as much as Davis does.
Woodland, in recent years did not have an elementary school for the new Spring Lake development/neighborhood, so they were willing to give their approval to the transfer requests that came from Spring Lake residents. They have recently completed construction of a new elementary school to serve Spring Lake, and it remains to be seen whether the stream of Spring Lake transfers dries up for DJUSD. Woodland deciding to deny transfer requests would make that happen for new requests. Under the provisions of the law, previously granted requests carry over for the duration of that individual student’s DJUSD education.
Matt there is this: “If a request for an interdistrict transfer/reciprocal agreement is denied, the student’s parents/guardians may file an appeal to the county office of education in the student’s district of residence within 30 days of receipt of the official notice of denial of the transfer.” That probably limits the ability of Woodland to deny the requests especially for parents working at UC Davis.
You may be right David. It may limit it somewhat, but I expect that any appeal hearing by the county office of education would include testimony by the Woodland School District in opposition to the appeal. If they decided to deny the request in the first place, they woul almost surely have decided to oppose any appeal.
Which begs the question, what grounds would the county office of education use to decide whether to grant the appeal?
Having been through that process, I can attest that the County Board is very reluctant to grant appeals. Of all the Interdistrict Transfer parents that appealed, only a handful were granted (including us) and they stressed that they were not establishing a precedent in our cases. An added wrinkle is that for the student to have a right to continue, the interdistrict transfer has to be continuous. Hard to say how the pandemic might have affected that. Any parents who failed to continue the paperwork this last year might find themselves out of luck if either district (obviously only the home district in this scenario) chose to be officious in regard to that continuous attendance.
I think it is very unlikely that Dixon school district would limit outgoing students. Woodland is a good question. If they do start to block transfers, it would definitely increase demand for family-size Davis housing.
“If they do start to block transfers, it would definitely increase demand for family-size Davis housing.”
Interesting point
If Spring Lake has an elementary, and since Pioneer is right there, the YCOE will increasingly see that it’s the parents’ burden to make their cases.
WM, I think it’s all implied: massive tracts of multi-family housing in Davis, a massive subsidies to developers to build this with a huge percentage of A-ffordable housing subsidized by taxpayers from anywhere and everywhere, all within the footprint of Davis since DG supports JeRkeD Measure, which means tearing down vast swaths of Davis ‘opportunity zones’ and replacing them with dense, multi-story, multi-family, family housing full of kids! It’s a Utopian, Unicornian Dream. But do any Utopians actually want to live there? No, that’s for EVERYONE ELSE.
On top of this, in whose twisted mind is more children a good thing? Especially anyone with an environmental mind. The best thing we can do for this world is vastly decrease the human population. This will decrease travel, use of resources, global warming, etc. Since Covid-19 failed to do it’s part as well as it could have, we either need a much more effective pandemic, or a vast decrease in the birth rate. We could then reduce world population by a couple of billion over the next century without relying on a virus and the pain that inflicts. Once we get moving again in this glorious new abnormal everyone is looking forward to, we’ll start burning more auto and jet fuel. Whoopie!
Maybe it’s time for the Davis school district to adjust to the actual changing demographics of the Davis population.
https://www.sonomawest.com/sonoma_west_times_and_news/news/grand-jury-report-suggests-school-district-consolidation-as-cost-saving-measure/article_34e60712-7753-559e-9b57-9a3c39598f86.html
In any case, declining enrollment is impacting a number of districts, statewide.
You don’t “grow a community” to meet the desires of a school district that refuses to adjust – out of self-interest. But, you can be sure that some associated with a given district (as well as some parents) are more than willing to throw a given community under the “developer’s bus”. Despite the fact that their own kids will be finished with school, long-before it ever becomes an issue for them, personally.
Feel free to share that with the Yolo County Grand Jury… if you do not, well… it’s just sniping, whining, or trolling…
Any citizen/resident can bring things to the attention of the Grand Jury… obviously, someone did in Sonoma…
Go for it…
Looks like that article is pretty old, but I’ve seen another one which shows that they are still discussing consolidation. The article I posted (above) also references some school districts in Sacramento which consolidated.
Meantime, this town in Sonoma county is (also) desperately trying to hang onto a high school, by “taxing tourists”:
https://www.sonomacountygazette.com/sonoma-county-news/save-our-high-schools-and-tax-tourists-fairly/
The denial of reality is palpable, everywhere.
The kind of consolidation discussed in the Sonoma Co. Grand Jury Report is about consolidating elementary (TK-8) and high school (9-12) districts, where you have two kinds of school districts serving the same geographic area. That’s what happened with the Sacramento Twin Rivers district. That’s also what a “unified” school district is. I believe that all of the school districts in Yolo County are unified. Davis schools once operated two different districts (an elementary & a high school district) until the early 60’s when they unified.
You could share if you wanted, but again that kind of consolidation discussion doesn’t make sense for Yolo Co.
If one were to ask the school district (and/or those associated with it), it definitely would not “make sense”.
It might, however, make sense to everyone else.
Just as closing an unneeded school makes “no sense” to those folks. Same reasoning in Sonoma county, apparently.
I certainly would not count on any financial analyses arising from self-interested school districts to provide a complete and honest analysis. Perhaps a reason for Grand Jury involvement.
Regarding Woodland, Spring Lake school is not built-out, but I believe that some parents are having trouble getting their kids enrolled there. Some parents are also pushing for another school at the planned technology park.
My guess is that Woodland’s school district is plenty happy to have DJUSD shoulder the burden, rather than building another school. Same with the parents and their kids, who benefit from Davis schools (and their “extra” programs).
At some point, maybe folks will realize that self-interested school districts (and those associated with them) should not be driving planning decisions. I, for one, am really starting to dislike those folks.
In some ways, it’s not so different from Davis bending-over backwards to accommodate UCD. But in that case, the demand is “already there” – and doesn’t have to be artificially “created”.
“At some point, maybe folks will realize that self-interested school districts (and those associated with them) should not be driving planning decisions.”
What evidence do you have that school districts are driving planning decisions? Notice that the name of my article was “the canary in the coal mine” referencing the use of canaries in typical coal mines to detect the presence of deadly gases. In other words, the analogy here suggests that the declining enrollment is not the problem itself but a symbol of the problem – the problem being a community imbalance caused by scarcity of housing and high costs of housing. Using that analogy, the declining enrollment is a leading indicator of the broader problem and thus refutes your claim that the district is driving planning decisions (on the contrary, it seems that UC Davis and not DJUSD is more likely driving planning decisions, btw).
That is an incorrect conclusion. There is plenty of “family” (single-family dwelling) housing in Davis. And, it’s quite affordable, for many (e.g., those moving from the Bay Area). There are new families moving in to areas such as Mace Ranch.
Also, people are having fewer kids, and California (for all intent and purposes) is no longer growing. This is as it should be. It’s also the case elsewhere (e.g., in Sonoma county).
As you’ve noted, things change.
One really has to look at this from a regional perspective, regardless. Sometime soon, I’d like to see the development in Folsom (which “jumped” Highway 50).
I have no idea what you’re trying to say, here. Declining enrollment is not a “problem”, except for those associated with the school district. It’s really not even a problem for parents, unless their own school closes before “Johnny” graduates.
My point regarding UCD is that (at least) there’s actual demand for their “product” (so far, at least). It doesn’t have to be “created” by other development.
If you read the links you post, the consolidation proposed in Sonoma Co. is for school districts that already overlap/coincide. There is considerable precedence for this; this sort of thing happened throughout the 20th century in California, mostly with high school and elementary school districts consolidating.
I don’t find clear what you are proposing. Are you proposing that Woodland & Davis consolidate? All of the school districts in Yolo Co. consolidate as one district? Please clarify.
Here’s a more recent article, regarding the proposal to consolidate districts in Sonoma county. This is just one that I happen to be (slightly) familiar with.
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/west-sonoma-county-school-district-launches-consolidation-feasibility-study/#:~:text=The%20West%20Sonoma%20County%20Union%20High%20School%20District%20Board%20of,of%20its%2010%20feeder%20districts.&text=The%20school%20board%20trustees%20made,regular%20board%20meeting%20Wednesday%20night.
In any case, it appears that the school district in question is (instead?) proposing to increase taxes on “tourists”, instead of closing an unneeded high school. From what I understand, “tourists” (at the coastline) include those from other parts of Sonoma county.
In any case, what I’m suggesting is that this isn’t actually a “problem” for anyone not associated with the school district. I’m also directly stating that some are willing to encourage sprawl, for the sole purpose of supporting unneeded schools. I find that disgraceful, and (at this point) I harbor some resentment toward those who advocate for that.
If a school district is too large for a given community changing needs, there’s an obvious answer for that. And anyone who counts on those self-interested entities to provide an impartial analysis is either dishonest themselves, or is a product of a dysfunctional school district.
This is what Hiram was trying to explain to you:
“Facing budget challenges and declining enrollment, West Sonoma County Union High School District has launched a study to examine the feasibility of consolidating with any or all of the 10 districts that feed into the high school district.
The school board trustees made the move official with a unanimous vote at their regular board meeting Wednesday night. The study will include all 10 districts that feed into the West County high school district: Fort Ross, Montgomery, Guerneville, Monte Rio, Forestville, Harmony, Oak Grove, Sebastopol, Twin Hills and Gravenstein.”
They don’t have a unified school district. So they are looking to merge high schools in one high school district. A little bit of knowledge here is dangerous.
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