The district’s school closure plan has a problem. It’s not a political problem or a budget problem, but a math problem. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
DJUSD hired the demographic firm MGT to project enrollment and justify school closures. The firm used a method called “Modified Cohort by Residence,” which excludes students who live outside district boundaries. In most districts, this is a reasonable simplification. MGT applied this method in the Kenosha USD in Wisconsin, where out-of-district students are only 1.4% of enrollment, in Richardson, Texas, they make up 2.6%, and in Orange County, they are 3.6%.
In DJUSD, however, interdistrict transfers account for 15.7% of our students. That’s 1,293 children who attend our schools, sit in our classrooms, and whose families choose us over the schools in their home districts. But according to our enrollment projections, if you live in Woodland, Dixon, or West Sacramento, your child does not matter to the future of the district.
Even MGT acknowledges the method is not commonly used, but explains: “Typically, school district projections are based on [total] enrollment by school. However, this method is inadequate when used to locate future school facility needs… A school’s enrollment can fluctuate due to variables in the curriculum, program changes, school administration and open enrollment policies.”
OK, that sounds fair. However, before discussing the effects of relying on such a method, we need to ask: Do these assumptions apply to us? Are we planning to eliminate programs that attract students from across the region? Will we discontinue the parent employment option for interdistrict transfer? (I hope not, because that would violate California Education Code Section 48204.)
In practice, when we apply the Modified Cohort by Residence method, the schools with the highest number of interdistrict transfer students will appear to have the lowest actual enrollment. Three schools that are heavily impacted by this are Birch Lane with 17.3% interdistrict transfers, Patwin with 20.3%, and Da Vinci Junior High with 43.4%. If those names sound familiar, they are the three schools mentioned in the Superintendent’s closure plans. This isn’t a coincidence. It’s the method working as intended, but it’s used in a way that produces absurd results. By excluding so many students, the method makes the enrollment crisis appear much worse than it is.
In reality, however, interdistrict transfers are considered a strength that can protect a district against fluctuations in resident enrollment. The Public Policy Institute for California found that “Attracting students and their families from nearby districts – either through interdistrict transfers or by motivating more families to move into the district – is an approach districts have at their disposal to mitigate declines.” The MGT report even points out that interdistrict enrollment has been increasing, offsetting the declines in resident enrollment. Interdistrict transfers are a sign that our schools are doing something right. Families across the region are willing to drive past closer schools to attend Birch Lane and Patwin. That’s not a problem to be solved. It’s a strength to be protected.
So Who Are These 1,293 Students?
They are not just numbers. They are children whose parents work in Davis but cannot afford Davis housing. They are families who moved to neighboring districts but still want their children to attend DJUSD schools. They come from districts with higher rates of unduplicated students than DJUSD – students who are English learners, foster youths, or eligible for free or reduced meals, who have the greatest need among all our students, but are not counted in our future. Is it really our intention to tell them that if you cannot afford to live in Davis, you are less welcome in our community or our schools?
The Superintendent has spoken publicly about housing challenges in Davis, telling The Davis Enterprise that his own friends and colleagues complain about paying “$3 grand in rent on a dump.” In today’s Davis market, $3,000/month is often the going rate for a three-bedroom townhouse – housing many families would consider standard, not disposable.
Meanwhile, the families most affected by this closure plan are those who couldn’t afford Davis at any price, who drive their children here because they value what our schools offer. If we “rightsize” to resident enrollment only, these families don’t just disappear from our spreadsheets. They get de-enrolled when capacity tightens. Their children lose their schools, their teachers, their friends.
I’ve spoken with families facing exactly this. One drives from Woodland, only ten minutes down Pole Line Road and closer than most of West Davis. They chose Birch Lane Montessori because it was the right fit for their child. Under this plan, however, their child doesn’t exist in the projections, along with 17.3% of the rest of the school. Enrollment looks lower than it is, so we close the school. Later, new housing is built, and resident enrollment rises. Can that family come back? Or must they first buy into the new development to prove they finally belong?
The absurdity of that question exposes the absurdity of the method. Telling 1,293 students they don’t matter because they live in the wrong zip code isn’t just demographic rounding. It’s geographic discrimination.
The Math That Actually Matters
The district frames school closures as rightsizing, but rightsizing to what? If we’re sizing only to resident enrollment, we’re not matching capacity to the students we actually serve. We would be abandoning 15.7% of them and calling it efficiency.
Looking at it another way, if we rightsize to 84.3%, what will we do with the extra students? Won’t we be overcapacity? It would be like rightsizing our gloves so they only have four fingers and then expecting them to fit. And let’s not forget the $14 million in LCFF funds that those interdistrict transfer students bring to the district every year. If we rightsize and there’s no room for them, that money leaves with them. We may save on facilities costs, but we lose far more in funding that cannot be replaced, even with new parcel tax revenue.
The Process We Got vs. The Process We Need
When you follow a process that renders 15.7% of district students invisible, it turns your public process into a performative act rather than a genuine effort to include, and California has experienced this before. In San Francisco, three board members were recalled in 2022 after a closure plan faced prolonged protests, and in 2024, their Superintendent was pressured to resign when a new, flawed closure plan was proposed. Oakland’s 2024 closure effort collapsed when the board “played fast and loose with the numbers and with public process.” And South Bay Union’s reorganization is still ongoing but is hampered by credibility issues stemming from superficial attempts to gather public input.
These districts followed an “announce and defend” approach: decide first, engage later, and treat community feedback as an obstacle to be managed rather than a resource to be leveraged. We are repeating their mistakes, but we don’t have to.
The California Department of Education recommends establishing an advisory committee “as early as possible” that includes “trusted leaders from the community” to help assure residents that “the problems leading to school closure are real, the process will be transparent, and the district’s intentions are good.”
The district has been discussing closure plans since September 2024. Over a series of board meetings, proposals were made about how to engage the community and form committees, exactly as CDE recommends. But rather than convene a committee as a first step toward developing plans collaboratively, the district announced two closure options in November 2025, almost fifteen months later. According to the Superintendent, dozens of alternatives had already been considered and eliminated. The community wasn’t invited to help shape the options – we were asked to choose between them. That is not engagement “before decisions are made.” That is after. Any committees formed going forward will already be anchored around these options, tethered to the Measure J/R/D vote in 2026 that the Superintendent reminds us is a way out of this mess.
Attorney General Bonta strongly recommends following AB 1912 guidelines for school closure planning. The law isn’t mandatory here, but his reasoning is sound: all closures have civil rights implications, and all public school students, including interdistrict students, are protected by the same laws. Any closure plan must account for them. Excluding students and ignoring equity leads to outcomes like those in Oakland and San Francisco.
The current plan does not include an equity impact analysis. It does something worse: it erases the affected students from the data entirely, making an equity analysis impossible by design. You cannot study the impact on students you’ve defined out of existence.
We are not following these best practices, but we should be.
What We Should Do Instead
The Board should stop the current process. Not pause it. Stop it.
Then:
- Follow known best practices that are recommended by the California Department of Education and the Attorney General, methods that have been used successfully in districts such as Azusa Unified and Sonoma Valley USD.
- Establish a community advisory committee that includes parents, educators, and residents before any new options are developed.
- Decouple the school closure discussion from the Measure J/R/D housing vote. The current messaging already sounds like “an offer we can’t refuse” and strains the limit of what districts can legally advocate. New housing will increase parcel tax revenue, but that has nothing to do with who lives there. Let people choose to live where they want to live, and let us not exclude them from our community for financial reasons or because they live in the wrong zip code.
- Commission an enrollment projection that includes all students, not just those who live within our boundaries. Use multiple methods, including the California-standard Cohort Survival method that is used by the CDE and the California Department of Finance to track enrollment.
- And conduct a genuine equity impact analysis that focuses on the 1,293 students that our current process ignores, as well as the 377 unduplicated students currently attending Birch Lane and Patwin.
Continuing with our current process is far too risky, given the actual numbers: Birch Lane currently enrolls 571 students — well over the 350-student threshold the district claims is necessary for viability. It also has the most unduplicated students among K-6 schools in the district and houses a popular choice program, both of which are protected by the district’s stated priorities. This program draws students from across the region, including 99 from outside our boundaries, from districts with greater need than our own. But according to the district, those students don’t exist. The method doesn’t count them. The closure plan doesn’t protect them. And if this process continues, the district will close its highest-need elementary school without ever accounting for the students it serves – exactly what Attorney General Bonta’s guidance was designed to prevent.
As I conclude this letter, I want to clarify that I am not suggesting we should stop the process and pretend like everything is fine. Inglewood Unified did that, avoiding tough fiscal decisions only to find itself in state receivership in 2012. What I am saying is that we cannot and should not base any boundary adjustment or closure decision on a method that deliberately gets the numbers so wrong.
At the end of the day, this issue is bigger than just DJUSD. Superintendent Best recently asked, “What sort of vision does the city have for itself?” and then said, “I don’t sense that vision currently.” Our vision aligns with the district’s stated pillars, including equity, access, and inclusion. To the city of Davis, those words are more than just buzzwords that come with thirty minutes of monthly professional development. They guide every decision we make, especially the difficult ones, like this one, which will shape our community for decades. If we close schools based on a method that knowingly excludes 15.7% of our students, we signal to those students and to the entire region that you only matter to us if you live within our zip code. That is not a part of anyone’s vision for the city of Davis.
If we truly believe in equity, access, and inclusion, we cannot erase 1,293 students and call it planning. We must implement a process that follows best practices, builds trust, respects and values all students, and ultimately strengthens our community.
Thank you for the thoughtful and thorough letter Noah. Without undervaluing all the other really good information it contains, there was one passage that stood out like a beacon. Specifically,
“At the end of the day, this issue is bigger than just DJUSD. Superintendent Best recently asked, “What sort of vision does the city have for itself?” and then said, “I don’t sense that vision currently.” Our vision aligns with the district’s stated pillars, including equity, access, and inclusion.”
The truthful answer to Superintendent Best’s question is that the City of Davis does not have a Vision for its future. If you go to the Vision section of the City’s General Plan there are over 30 often contradictory statements that point in a wide variety of directions, but with nothing that says what Davis wants to be in 5 years or 10 years or any time in the future. Nor is there anything that addresses the sustainability and/or resilience of either where the city is going in the future or where it has been going in the 25 years since the General Plan was adopted.
The crumbling conditions of Davis’ roads and infrastructure tell us that what we have been doing in those 25 years is neither sustainable nor resilient.
Noah references three pillars. Does anyone know what those three pillars are? I’ve never seen them in any City of Davis documents or venues. So my question to Noah (and everyone) is, “What are those three pillars, and are they sustainable and resilient?”
At the DCAN general plan event last weekend, one participant told me that everyone has the same vision of what new housing should look like, and she couldn’t understand why developers hadn’t delivered that type of development. I pointed out maybe not everyone agreed on that and the developers had no clear signal on what that vision is, as you point out. I suggested that what we need is a set of development directives that we all vote on and in exchange for complying, the developers can skip the final Measure J/R/D vote. (If they don’t comply they can still run the electoral gauntlet.) In the end, we get at least one indicator of our vision.
“one participant told me that everyone has the same vision of what new housing should look like”
That is obviously not true.
I was there. They put up a picture of a Leave it to Beaver style home and asked whose vision looked like that? I was the only one who raised a hand.
Richard, isn’t a vision for housing type very different than a city’s Vision for what it is and what it wants its future to be?
Because the City has spent the last 25 years with no Vision for what it wants to be going forward, the City’s costs of operation have grown much, much faster than its revenues, there has been insufficient money for maintenance of our streets and buildings, our streets are crumbling, and the people who work in Davis providing us with services (like the good folks working for Don at Redwood Barn) have virtually no options for affordable housing in the city where they work … while at the same time we have an abundance of million dollar sale price homes for refugees from the Bay Area.
Bottom-line, having a vision for housing types will not move the City toward a sustainable and resilient future.
Thank you for the comment, Matt! I’m glad you appreciated the article. The pillars I was referring to come from the DJUSD Strategic Plan, which can be found here: https://www.djusd.net/strategic_plan_. It’s an inspiring webpage, but it needs to be more than aspirational.
To your point, I agree that the City of Davis appears to show this disconnect. However, I would argue that we are not lacking vision, but we do lack a clear path to realizing that vision, and struggling to find that path undermines our sense of unity. Given a choice between struggling for direction and struggling with our values, I would choose our struggle for direction any day. From there, it’s up to our community leaders to help us find a way, one step at a time, without compromising those values.
I also appreciate your point about sustainability and resilience. Our city (and our schools) are going to undergo continuous change as we evolve with the world around us — and the world is changing incredibly fast these days! Davis today is not the same as it was 20 years ago or 50 years ago. But it’s still Davis, and our core values are represented everywhere around us, in every park and bike path, and in all of our school programs and community events. These are the strengths of our community and the reasons why so many people want to be a part of it. However, while our values and motivations are resilient and sustainable, all of that means nothing if the systems we build are not. Planning for the future means balancing preservation of our strengths with conservation of the resources we need to survive. When we have to make those decisions and change as a community, it’s much easier to find a common path forward when we all have the same information, and we can align on the priorities and the strengths that make us who we are. I say all of this while hand-waving toward Davis issues at large, but taking the school closure plan as an example — it doesn’t have all of the information, and it doesn’t reflect our strengths or our priorities. We can do better, and we must.
Thank you for the response Noah. Let’s build this start into a dialogue, not just a moment in time. To help others join in in this dialogue, here is what the DJUSD site says about the pillars Noah referred to:
“We are aspiring to be the school district where every student’s unique learning needs are met, where our unique community’s strengths are integrated into our understanding and educational experiences, where we build and foster a cohesive team of dedicated professionals who together empower student success, and where a relentless pursuit of improvement ensures ongoing growth.
The plan is organized around four high-level strategies called Pillars that are the building blocks for action and decision making and provide the frame for organizing our work. Each pillar contains eight to ten associated Key Actions, which are targeted solutions, structures, processes, or practices that will advance our strategic work to accomplish our Goals for Student Success.
Pillar A: Teaching Differently — Culturally Responsive, Differentiated Teaching
Pillar B: Vibrant Partnerships — Engaging Our Unique Community
Pillar C: Systemic & Effective Supports — Investing in Our Team
Pillar D: Culture of Excellence & Accountability — Committing to Continuous Improvement
Looking at those Pillars, how do they relate to the broader context of the City? You say in your comment above, “I would argue that we are not lacking vision, but we do lack a clear path to realizing that vision.” I’m not sure what that vision might be. Are you willing to share it here?
Hi Matt,
I appreciate the dialogue, and at the risk of drifting into (possibly long-winded!) personal reflection… :)
The DJUSD pillars embody equity, access, and inclusion in a number of ways. In practice, this is reflected in initiatives such as Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS). Coincidentally, UDL overlaps significantly with the Montessori methods used at Birch Lane Montessori, and Birch Lane is the district’s PBIS flagship school (even winning an award in 2019). Each of the DJUSD pillars also includes equity-specific actions to ensure that all students are served, no matter what.
DJUSD Pillar 1 focuses on curriculum design, striving to meet the needs of all students through accommodation or differentiation. It provides students with choices to learn and grow in ways that respect their individuality, regardless of background, ability, or goal (a key aspect of UDL is student choice). This pillar highlights inclusion and the importance of valuing every student, while also fostering ways to teach inclusion as a lifelong practice. Drawing a parallel to us as a city, to me, it means recognizing and respecting the needs and values of every person in Davis, across the lifespan, from the kindergartener to the college student to the retiree, including parents and those without children, of all ethnicity, identity, and orientation. Labels are self-selected to enrich and affiliate, not imposed to marginalize or exclude. Everyone is welcome here, and everyone’s needs are respected.
For DJUSD Pillar 2, it’s about engaging with the community and the environment so that education and educational supports extend beyond the fences of a given school. For us as a city, I see something very similar, where we engage with each other and our neighboring communities in ways that enrich our lives and the region as a whole. We do not build walls between us and our neighbors. Our community is one of many in the region, and we’re all interconnected. At the same time, we respect the identity of our neighbors. We stand for what we believe in, as do Dixon, Woodland, and West Sacramento. And we value the differences and uniqueness of each community, recognizing that our super-community is stronger for it.
For DJUSD Pillar 3, it’s about all the people who keep the school running, from teachers to operations, student support, and administration, and doing what we can to help those individuals do their best work. As a city, this relates to our infrastructure and leaders, who play a vital role in supporting and enabling our ability to live and thrive. This is a key part of the point you raised about sustainability and resilience.
For DJUSD Pillar 4, it’s about intentional growth and change. We proactively evaluate systems and revise our services and methods to ensure we meet the changing needs of students. From a management perspective, in times of scarcity, this involves carefully investing in systems and practices while keeping a long-term focus on services and the capacity to serve students efficiently. As a city and community, we face constraints in space, time, and money, and we struggle because it requires finding consensus about where we want to be in 10 years and prioritizing what’s most important for that vision. In this struggle, we must continuously adapt to changes in our community and the world around us, meeting them with the same core values that have always defined us – values that serve as a beacon at times and a benchmark at others, reflecting who we genuinely are. There will be challenges we face and sacrifices we have to make, but we must meet them intentionally, with purpose, and guided by those values. And we must hold ourselves accountable for our decisions and the future we create for those who come after us. This alone makes it worth the struggle.
Earlier, when I distinguished equity, access, and inclusion from sustainability and resilience, it was only because one is external/direction-oriented and the other is internal/execution-oriented. The key is realizing that these are two sides of the same coin: if our system is inequitable, if it limits access unreasonably, or if it excludes those who don’t “fit in”, it’s not a system that should be sustained (per Pillar 4).
Stepping back, I want to thank you again for the dialogue. For us in Davis, what’s amazing is that these debates are so passionate, which is proof to me that we all really love living here. To paraphrase what I wrote at the end of the op-ed, we may not be fully aligned on how to achieve our shared vision, but I think we can all agree on what our vision is not!
Noah, thank you for this detailed answer. It does illuminate internal DJUSD principles. They answer how we “travel” but nothing about where we are currently “traveling” nor where we want our “travels” to take us. Moving from principles to vision takes a comprehensive approach to visioning framed by five simple questions:
1. Where are we now?
2. Where are we going?
3. Where do we want to be?
4. How do we get there?
5. Are we getting here?
In many ways the questions you have raised in your OpEd/letter challenge the completeness and/or validity of the information the DJUSD report is providing that pertains to Questions 1. and 2. from that list of five. The principles of the four Pillars are important/essential components of addressing Question 3. but without an established and broadly understood answer to Question 2. we are effectively driving down the highway, but without knowing whether we are going to the North, the South, the East, or the West.
In the past 25 years (according to governmental jobs reports, the City of Davis has not added any meaningful jobs to its jobs base other than less than 1,000 jobs (1) providing and cleaning rooms at our additional hotels, providing services at our expanded healthcare/hospital facilities. The number of higher paying jobs associated with intellectual capital creation has actually decreased in that same 25-year period.
Absent jobs that pay enough to support the purchase of our existing inventory of $850,000 plus homes, or the building of new lower priced homes ($500,000 sale prices for example) DJUSD will be forced to look even more to inter district transfers to survive.
With that said, with respect to what you personally think Davis’ Vision should be,
Where/What is Davis now?
Where is Davis going?
Where does Davis want to be?
How do we get there?
How should we ensure we getting there?
Hi Matt,
(I’m replying to an earlier comment of yours because the comment section here seems to stop at a specific level of depth. That said, I’d love to meet for coffee somewhere to keep the dialogue going! Getting back to your questions…)
You’re absolutely right — I didn’t name a destination. Given how rapidly the world is changing these days, pointing toward a specific destination that’s more than 10-15 years away is a fool’s errand. At best, we’ll be chasing trends and lagging indicators that are themselves 2-3 years out of date. (For a fun digression, look up Waterfall versus Agile development methods.)
Speaking to the vision-oriented questions you raised, I can tell you what I’ve experienced as a private citizen, but a focus group with a sample size of 1 is hardly a focus group!
My background is more data science, education policy, and management. As you may know, with any management decision, your decision is only as good as your data and your process for using that data to generate solutions and develop implementation plans. If you have biased, incomplete, or incorrect data, then your outcome will be flawed, no matter how good the process. Garbage in, garbage out. Likewise, if you have a flawed process, then it doesn’t matter how good your data is, you’re going to end up on the wrong path. You will be misled by your own treatment of that data.
In this context, the issue begins with the data we have from MGT and the questions that follow (and ultimately, the process that is implemented to act on those questions). To that point, I think the question of interdistrict transfers requires us to adopt a unique lens on who our customers are and what our boundaries really mean to those customers. We are a super-community of mid-sized, individual communities, each separated by 6-10 miles of agricultural land. Individual school districts have autonomy over how they treat their customers, including the approval of interdistrict transfers. Individual cities also have autonomy over how they develop and grow to meet the needs of their residents. Our students (customers) are engaging with all of this, but our market report (MGT) has taken a myopic view of who we serve and why, giving us results that don’t make sense. It would be like Coca-Cola doing a marketing study that only looked at households with Coke in the fridge, ignoring everyone who buys it elsewhere. They would predict declining consumption, then worry about questions like “how can we fit more in there?” and “how can we get more refrigerators in this house?”
In reality, no data and no process will be perfect. But we can mitigate against the risk of suspect data by using multiple sources of data and looking for convergent validity, and we can adopt step-wise, flexible processes that allow us to learn and pivot as we move toward a solution. (A solution that’s defined directionally and by requirements — this is as much about creation and discovery as it is about understanding and resolving a need.)
From a management perspective, there are pros and cons to all processes (unilateral, consultative, consensus, subgroup, etc) and it’s tempting to say “You can’t please them all! May as well just do it!” and force an issue. When deciding how to make a decision (as funny as that sounds), there are clear ways to weigh the pros and cons of different methods and to ensure we’re following a process that works best for the shape of the problem and for all stakeholders involved.
One of the fatal flaws of decision making is to be too much in love with your solution that you forget to solve the real problem. That’s what the current closure plan looks like, a real estate solution in search of an enrollment problem.
Additionally, our current process does not appear to follow any known best practices from those who have the most experience with these decisions (CDE and AG Bonta), and it appears to be a mixture of unilateral and internal committee disguised as consensus. For starters, you cannot follow an “announce and defend” strategy and claim to be consensus-oriented. And in all of the conversations I’ve had with concerned parents, they’ve received the same flavor of response from the district when asking questions: “check the data and you will understand” or “write in on a post-it note and we’ll get back to you.” Ultimately, data is about what we know and what matters, process is about leadership and how we reach a solution. The current school closure plan is using suspect data and is following a flawed process.
And finally, tying it all back to your original question about the DJUSD Pillars and how we implement them — Leadership around core values is about leadership of those things that remain constant, as we weather the variability and the ups and downs of the world around us. The values of equity, access, and inclusion are the constants we hold closest, and the solutions we build toward must have those intrinsic to them. Among many things, the school closure process is lacking this as well.
Excellent letter. I’m surprised to learn that the district isn’t adequately counting the students from Woodland in particular, in regard to DJUSD’s claim of declining enrollment.
At this point, WJUSD is “counting on” DJUSD to accommodate Woodland students. No doubt, that’s a large part of the reason that they haven’t built the previously-planned schools in Spring Lake (other than one small one), and are also apparently not planning to build another school at the planned “technology park” adjacent to Highway 113 (with 1,600 more planned housing units there).
Definitely saving WJUSD a lot of money, by not having to build another $50 million dollar school (and then permanently staff it).
Maybe at some point in the future, the two districts can be consolidated into one (thereby saving a lot of money, for both). At which point, the “Woodland deadbeats” might have to contribute toward school district parcel taxes.
As an economic consultant, I’ve been disappointed in the simplistic analysis presented by MGT. Relying on a single development within Davis (The Cannery) rather than using either national, state or regional data on student yields is borderline professional malpractice. Ignoring the trends in a clearly identified 15% of current enrollment is another error. The District needs to move on to a better qualified consultant.
We will post an article soon that has a chart showing the type of analysis that MGT should have undertaken. (I can’t post a graphic here apparently.)
If you send it to me, I can do it
Contrary to this op-ed, the DJUSD/MGT enrollment projections clearly DO include interdistrict transfers. Refer to Table 9 or Chart 7-8 of the March 2025 report linked below. IDTs are projected to continue to increase over time.
2024 = 8,241 total students (1,293 IDT and 6,948 resident)
2034 = 7,391 total students (1,424 IDT and 5,967 resident)
There may be some confusion because of the use of the term “Students Not Included in Forecast” when referring to IDTs in Table 9. This term is likely used in reference to the resident student forecasts, not total student forecasts.
https://cdnsm5-ss18.sharpschool.com/UserFiles/Servers/Server_117089/File/Departments/CSO/BoundaryOutreach/Attachment.pdf
Craig, your comment confuses me. If interdistrict transfers are so important to the future, why bury them in a Table and Chart rather than discussing/featuring them in the main body and summary of the report?
Matt – that’s a terrific question for the report authors.
Hi Craig,
Thank you for the close reading! You’ve identified a distinction worth clarifying: there’s a difference between students “included in the report” and students “included in the forecast model.”
The 1,293 IDT students appear in MGT’s tables, but they’re not being forecasted going forward — they’re assumed constant per grade band while resident students are modeled dynamically. You can see this in Table 10, where IDT numbers stay flat across grade bands over time. MGT is watching existing IDT cohorts mature through the pipeline, not predicting future IDT enrollment the way they model resident enrollment.
The exclusion-from-forecast language appears in several places, but MGT says this explicitly on PDF page 21: “The forecast model is based upon student residence and excludes students residing outside of the district boundaries.”
MGT’s track record on IDT tracking should also give us pause. In their 2018-2019 report, they used the same constant-going-forward assumption and predicted our 2024-2025 non-resident enrollment would be 1,041. The actual number is 1,293 — 24% higher than expected. Now, MGT projects IDTs will reach 19.2% of enrollment by 2034, and again, that’s with a static model that has consistently undercounted.
And that’s where we need to go deeper into the region than MGT does by default, to understand why, more and more, families are choosing DJUSD over their local districts. On some level, this may have to do with housing availability, but for every family that lives in West Sacramento and drives to DJUSD, there may also be parents who live in Davis and whose children go to DJUSD, but who work in West Sacramento or beyond. Looking ahead, like we saw with Spring Lake, for every new housing development in West Sacramento or Woodland, there will be some new residents who want to send their children to DJUSD, and they will find that it’s worth the 10-15 minute drive to get here.
Meanwhile, the closure options we’ve been presented with are based on resident enrollment only — it’s the only way you can look at Birch Lane and claim that 571 enrolled students falls below the district’s viability threshold of 350. That’s the disconnect I’m pointing to: our long term plan needs a more realistic view on who our students are and where they come from. We need to look at who our students are and predict from there, not look at our boundaries to tell us which students to look at and which to exclude.
Regarding earlier reports — DJUSD has taken down the links, but the Internet Archive still has them and the files are still there.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201001012612/https://www.djusd.net/departments/business_services/other_reports
https://cdnsm5-ss18.sharpschool.com/UserFiles/Servers/Server_117089/File/Departments/Business_Services/Reporting/2Davis%20Demo%20Final%20Report%202019%201-29%20(1).pdf
Noah – MGT used two different “forecast models” for resident and IDT student projections. The resident and IDT student forecasts were then combined to forecast the total student enrollment.
The resident student forecast model appears to be more robust by accounting for local development projects and demographic/socioeconomic projections. The IDT “exclusion-from-forecast” language is in reference to this resident student forecast model.
The IDT student forecast model estimates future IDT enrollment using historic trends. This is perhaps an overly simplified approach, but it is a forecast nonetheless.
Forecasting is imprecise work fraught with uncertainty, especially for timeframes greater than 5 years. For example, you compare forecasts from 2018 with 2024 actuals. Back in 2018, it would’ve been impossible to anticipate the pandemic and its effects on local development, demographics, etc.
Your last point strikes a chord – we simply don’t know the details of what the closure options are based off of. Or what other options have been considered. This work hasn’t been shown to us and is a source of confusion and frustration among many in the community.
“The 1,293 IDT students appear in MGT’s tables, but they’re not being forecasted going forward — they’re assumed constant per grade band while resident students are modeled dynamically. You can see this in Table 10, where IDT numbers stay flat across grade bands over time. MGT is watching existing IDT cohorts mature through the pipeline, not predicting future IDT enrollment the way they model resident enrollment.”
That makes sense because accepting ID transfer students is entirely discretionary at the outset. Once a student is in, they are (mostly) guaranteed continued transfer status so long as it is continuous (the ‘mostly’ comes from a change to the state law after our kids were here that allowed the superintendent to cancel transfer agreements under some conditions). But the decision to allow future transfers is completely up to the district. Whereas any resident is guaranteed a place at the school of their residence.
So they are, in fact, constant per grade band because the numbers are controlled by the district. Put another way: the district cannot control how many kids live here, but they can control how many kids are allowed to transfer here.
I think their methodology makes sense. You seem to be suggesting that they should model for the potential market for ID transfers, but even that would be fraught with uncertainty. If Woodland builds another school, for example, demand for transfers could drop.
“Nor is there anything that addresses the sustainability and/or resilience of either where the city is going in the future or where it has been going in the 25 years since the General Plan was adopted.”
Yes, instead of 25 years of no growth leading to a steady state of sustainability it has led to decline. First the roads and now the schools
Ron, you appear to only be thinking in terms of housing growth. Given that the City’s own financial analyses have consistently shown over and over again that housing produces more costs for the City than revenues, how is growth of housing not producing less sustainability rather than more sustainability?
If we want more sustainability and resilience, thinking only in terms of housing is only digging the hole we are in deeper. We are in our current unsustainable, unresilient state of affairs ac state of economy because of that narrow thought process.
Thoughts?
I believe the problem is that because we’ve driven up the price of housing, driving 4,500 workers out of town who used to reside here but now live out of town, we’ve hollowed out our local economy. Our retail sales tax revenue has plummeted as revealed in the Measure Q debate so our housing does not pay for itself. Just adding more expensive housing will not solve our problem. That’s why it must be targeted at those who desire to live AND work here.
They’re “choosing” to live out of town due to the price differential that no amount of development in Davis will change. And since they can send their kids to Davis schools without paying any school district parcel tax, why wouldn’t they select that option?
Families with kids want two car garages, yards, etc. (Actually, most of them want 3-car garages – one side for bikes, yard equipment, storage, etc.)
They’re better off buying a Stanley Davis “pre-owned” house in Davis, compared to any “new” option in either of those cities (Woodland OR Davis). With very little or not Mello Roos, as an added bonus. Not to mention mature landscaping, wider streets, closer to downtown and UCD, etc.
If there’s any families shopping for housing who are reading this (and don’t know how to use Zillow to find a house), please let me know. (Though I suspect that if they’re having trouble with that simple task, housing is not their “actual” problem.)
Richard, what evidence do you have that we have driven 4,500 workers out of town who used to reside here?
Many of those 4,500 still live in Davis … they simply have retired, and are still living in their Davis home. Many others of the 4,500 have left the University for a new job at a different institution. Others have chosen to move from Davis to Woodland as a financial asset portfolio balancing action.
With that said, I completely agree with your final two sentences.
It would be interesting to see how DJUSD accounted for the 1,600 housing units planned at the Woodland Technology park (adjacent to Highway 113 and Road 27). A group of local, committed parents have been trying for years to get WJUSD to commit to a school at that site, but it appears that they’ve failed – repeatedly. They put forth a great deal of effort, but I believe they’ve finally given up. Their interest was partly driven by the fact that WJUSD did not build the planned schools within the original Spring Lake development, other than one small school. Which, for a period of time at least, resulted in some parents not being able to get their kids enrolled in that school.
WJUSD also does not want to close a school where enrollment is declining (in older parts of town), so they apparently use kids from across town to “fill that gap”.
There’s still other ongoing housing construction occurring in Spring Lake, as well.
“Just adding more expensive housing will not solve our problem. That’s why it must be targeted at those who desire to live AND work here.”
It’s funny how you always argue that your preferred solution is the answer but you really don’t understand the problem.
Under Prop 13 your taxes are determined by your cost basis and are set at 1% plus a 2% annual cola. This worked well until Prop 98 guaranteed half of the property tax receipts to the schools. New California housing hasn’t paid its infrastructure carrying costs since. In Davis we have made up some of the deficit with supplemental taxes but it still isn’t enough even though we are being taxed at around 1.3% of our cost basis plus the 2% cola. Additionally, in general, the longer you have lived in your home the lower your original tax basis so it is really the long-term residents who are free riding on our declining infrastructure.
The answer is to set the supplemental tax rate on new housing such that the costs cover the long term infrastructure maintenance costs for that housing. In Mountain House, California’s newest city, those supplemental taxes put the total property tax burden at around 2% plus the 2% annual cola.
“This worked well until Prop 98 guaranteed half of the property tax receipts to the schools.”
That IS a problem, as enrollment declines statewide. Wondering when school districts are going to voluntarily give some of that money back, as the overall need declines. Though perhaps this occurs automatically, when there’s fewer students.
If I was still a student, I might ask “my” school district for a “cut of the money” if I agree to attend their school system – rather than changing to some other school district (or get home schooling). Personally, I think we should let students know about the arrangement that districts have with the state, as it might give them a different perspective.
:-)
I was hoping for less nonsensical replies and a more honest discussion.
“I’ve spoken with families facing exactly this. One drives from Woodland, only ten minutes down Pole Line Road and closer than most of West Davis. They chose Birch Lane Montessori because it was the right fit for their child.”
But they have no specific right to have their child attend the school of their choice, because attendance at a particular school is by residence.
This is one of the issues with interdistrict transfers and how they are implemented.
When my kids were ID transfer students, we knew that we had no choice as to which school they would attend nor which classroom they would be in. At that time the district was overcrowded. We could state our preference and every attempt would be made to provide continuity, but no guarantee.
The first day of 5th grade, my daughter did not know where she would be assigned. A few days into the school year we knew she’d be at Valley Oak; then she ended up in whichever classroom was coming up short for numbers.
8th grade? We didn’t know which junior high school had room for her the first week of school. So she enrolled in DSIS and that turned out to be a great fit. But it wasn’t our intention initially.
You cannot project interdistrict enrollment by school site because the resident students have priority. The only thing you can say for sure is that you can fill the seats with interdistrict students after the regular enrollees have all been apportioned in the first week of school.
As surrounding cities continue to grow, there is a nearly unlimited market for interdistrict transfers to DJUSD, so long as the outgoing districts don’t balk. But they aren’t evenly distributed by grade level, and have to be matched with available resources which are also not evenly distributed. Any attempt at projecting future interdistrict enrollment will be very complicated and I wouldn’t have great confidence in the numbers.
If schools are closed now, the district could face a crowding issue in a decade or so as new housing developments get built and occupied. Davis has had spurts of home construction that impacted the school district, and then long intervals of low housing production. Communities that grow more evenly can plan more readily. At the very least, DJUSD should be cautious about selling off vacated sites as there could be a demand for those sites in another generation.
Don: Even “resident” students in ANY school district apparently don’t necessarily have priority regarding the particular school they’d prefer (see my earlier comment). Also, DJUSD itself is acknowledging this – whether or not one or both of the sprawling proposals are approved.
But I agree overall (despite most of my comments over time regarding this), that any school district should proceed cautiously when closing down schools. For that matter, it’s possible that Davis voters might approve an additional “premium” to keep existing schools open (though I think it would be a difficult “sale” due to the out-of-district students currently keeping all DJUSD schools open – without contributing any parcel taxes toward them). Perhaps UCD should be making a contribution toward that, in regard to its employees who live out-of-district.
I believe you are an exception regarding “non-resident” parcel taxes, due to your ownership of a business parcel. In other words, you weren’t a deadbeat – unlike some of the other out-of-district attendees.
Don says: “If Woodland builds another school, for example, demand for transfers could drop.”
As I’ve noted elsewhere on this page and in previous articles, it’s highly unlikely that they’re going to do so. No one commenting on this article knows more about that than I do.
Now, if DJUSD hadn’t already been poaching Woodland students for years at this point, it’s likely that WJUSD wouldn’t have abandoned multiple school sites within Spring Lake.
I will say that I don’t “blame” Woodland parents for taking advantage of DJUSD on an individual level, and I believe most of them would prefer keeping their kids at WJUSD – all other factors being equal. (And most of them do just that – or attend the local Christian school which is another option for some.)
Superintendent Best provided a helpful response to this op-ed during last night’s Board meeting. It can be found starting at around 2:25:30 of the meeting recording.
https://davis.granicus.com/player/clip/1906?view_id=4&redirect=true
“There was an article in the Vanguard about not counting interdistrict students. They are included in the forecasts. Unfortunately it’s kind of buried a little bit.
When you look there’s a big chart that has resident student decline. The projected resident student decline will be around – if the forecast is accurate – around 6,000 resident students by 2034. And there’s about 1,300 non-resident students that are included in the forecast. When you look at that number across those years, it’s increasing slightly.
Basically what has happened over the last 15-20 years with interdistrict transfers is the rate of interdistrict transfer students was increasing at a pretty high number every year. So we had what I would call net new interdistrict transfers. When you look back at those numbers on that chart you can see those numbers growing by 30, 50, 70, 100 a year, filling those spaces vacated by the resident student decline.
That number is flattening. And that flattened projection is what is used to move forward. If we see continued flattening from this current year, that will roll into the assumptions going forward. If the assumption starts to rebound and get better, that assumption will play out into the future years. So we sort of use the logic as until we see the change, we’re not going to change the forecast for IDTs.
The resident forecast is based on mobility and birth rates primarily.”