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As the Mountain View Whisman School District wrestles with looming budget cuts to address slumping revenue and growing expenditures, it’s also preparing for its student body to shrink in the coming years.
The school board was presented with current and projected demographics and anticipated enrollment numbers at a Sept. 17 board meeting. The presentation and following discussion required no vote, but it factored into the district’s overarching conversation related to its Master Facilities Plan.
The Master Facilities Plan, created in 2019, is a roadmap relating to upgrades and projects across the district’s different campuses as it tackled growing student enrollment. But after the Covid-19 pandemic, the district saw a stark decline in enrollment. While numbers have increased, they are nowhere near pre-Covid levels.
Birth rates have slowed since the Covid-19 pandemic, and the creation of family-friendly housing developments have as well, according to past data. As a result, the number of students expected to enroll in the district is slowly shrinking, Rob Murray, director of demographics from King Consulting, told the board.
“If you want kids, you tend to look at single-family detached housing,” Murray told the board. “This is not a place where you have a lot.”
This school year, there are 4,664 enrolled students in the district. The projected enrollment dips to 4,643 the following year, and by the 2031-32 school year, enrollment is projected to drop to 4,557.
Beginning in the 2020-21 school year, the district’s enrollment has reflected a local trend that was seen during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to Murray: Families leaving the area.
“Particularly, out of California and to other states – we know it was a big theme during those times,” Murray said. “I do not miss getting all those updates of U-Haul statistics, of how many trucks were leaving California versus coming in.”
Although the enrollment dip was a one-time change, Murray said the impact was “undeniable.” And while enrollment numbers reached an all-time low in the 2021-22 school year, the district has slowly been increasing its number of students.
Murray attributed the district’s recent growth in enrollment to the expansion of transitional kindergarten.
Last school year, TK became universally available to all 4-year-olds and the district saw an increase in enrollment from 211 to 247 TK students. But during that time, the district also saw a decrease in kindergarten students, from 495 to 474.
“So that’s really the story of what we’re tracking as we look at this progression of larger, older cohorts of students who will give way as they naturally age up and matriculate out of the district and being replaced by these smaller cohorts,” Murray said. “So your bottom line was held by TK expansion, it wasn’t helping what’s happening in any given year.”
During the meeting, trustee Devon Conley inquired how the district would be affected by dwindling enrollment considering its designation as a basic-aid district – meaning it is primarily funded by property taxes.
Chief Business Officer Rebecca Westover responded that the funding isn’t connected to the number of students – but if there are too many teachers and not enough students, the district isn’t operating efficiently.
“Once we reach a certain size, we stop having efficiency,” Westover told Conley during the meeting. “When our classes are 20 students as opposed to 24 and we see that across the district, it costs $2 (million) to $3 million because of a loss of efficiency.”
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The sensational article title doesn’t seem to match the more moderate drop of 150 out of 4500 students in the long term.
I think the decline in students will be much worse in the future. These road changes/road diet initiatives have been brutal on my commute times to pickup/drop off my children. No it’s not possible to drop off 4 children at three separate schools in different directions by walking. Driving takes about 3 hours now per day for pickup and drop off between my wife and I. Children all under 12. We’re really looking forward to moving out of MV next year so we don’t have to deal with this nonsense.
Perhaps we need to consider the possibility that declining enrollment is a function of the district’s competitiveness and attractiveness compared to private schools, homeschooling, or nearby public school districts where families may choose to live instead? Or a failure to properly promote what is attractive? (20-24-student class size actually sounds pretty good!).
The choice is to adjust operations to fit a more efficient operating point, or do something about the inputs to this trend. The answer is something where City Council, the MVWSD Board, and the MVLA high school district Board all have a role to play… if you care about this, vote accordingly in November for candidates who will work on the inputs to a demographic trend that, while modest, is still concerning.
Until the decline causes a discussion about closing a school, it’s not a real concern.