Five California Parents Shed Light on the Public School Enrollment Crisis
Written by Rebecca Bodenheimer
Since the onset of the pandemic, California has seen a troubling decline in K-12 public school enrollment. This past academic year, enrollment declined by 1.8%, following a 2.6% drop in the 2020-21 academic year, when most California schools were closed. In April, State Superintendent Tony Thurmond announced a task force to address declining enrollment. However, as our Executive Director Megan Bacigalupi noted, there are no parent representatives on the task force, which is a major problem—particularly because state educational leaders don’t fully understand the factors accounting for the drop in public school enrollment.
While enrollment had been declining even before the pandemic, now even charter schools are seeing slight declines. Private school enrollment is up by 1.7%, but that doesn’t account for the 110,000 fewer California public school students from 2020-21 to 2021-22. A percentage of them can be explained by the lack of affordable housing in the state (forcing families to move) and the decision by many parents not to enroll their children in kindergarten during the pandemic. Nonetheless, it’s clear that California’s educational leaders are at a loss as to why parents have abandoned public education, and thus about how to reverse this decline.
CA Parent Power decided to ask our followers why they left the state’s public education system—and what (if anything) could bring them back. We spoke with five parents from across the state about their experiences. While the first story is unsurprisingly related to how prolonged school closures have driven parents away from public education, the parents we interviewed raised a number of other issues as well.
Luna*, a San Diego mom saw the writing on the wall early: by September 2020, she knew the San Diego Unified schools weren’t going to reopen any time soon, and began looking around for private schools for her older daughter. They were able to find an opening in a private Waldorf school in January 2021. Luna also has a younger daughter who’s eligible to begin kindergarten this coming September, but she’s decided to keep her in preschool for another year, because her trust has been broken by the public school system. “You don't know when they're gonna close again and San Diego Unified, if you compare with the other suburban schools…they have had the policies that are geared towards keeping children out of school the most,” like strict quarantine and masking policies. Nonetheless, Luna doesn’t see private school for two kids as a long-term solution, and her family is thinking of moving to a more suburban part of San Diego County, where she saw public school districts work harder to reopen schools during the pandemic.
Anne Ponugoti’s twins were in the second grade in the Castro Valley Unified School District (Alameda County) when the pandemic began. She’d been heavily involved at their school—she was PTA president—but knew virtual learning would be a huge challenge, especially for her son. Like virtually all Bay Area school districts, their school didn’t open in Fall 2020, and while Ponugoti’s daughter seemed to be managing alright in virtual learning, her son was often “laying on the floor crying.” She pulled him in November 2020 and enrolled him in a small private school. But once her daughter saw her son going to “real school,” as she put it, she insisted on going too, because they gave out textbooks, and not just worksheets. Ponugoti said, “I'm planning to keep my kids at this private school until [the end of] middle school.”
While Ponugoti’s initial reasons for moving her kids to private school were because of prolonged school closures, she has come to realize other issues that make her hesitant to return to public school. For one, she sees a high rate of attrition from teachers and is worried about possible behavioral problems and not enough adult supervision once her kids get to middle school: “What's been nice about the private school on top of the education is, it's clean. They have bathrooms that work. They get to sit down and eat their lunch. It's not this constant madness at recess and lunch.” She added that the reason she got involved at her kids’ public school in the first place was that she saw so little adult supervision at lunchtime, because of inadequate staffing.
Finally, Ponugoti is worried about the way public schools are teaching math. She believes the curriculum has been “dumbed down” through an integrated math approach: “You don't have to have specialist teachers and then you can just smooth over those grades. So if you're doing geometry and algebra in the same year, if you're strong on one and weak on the other, you can still sort of average out at a passing grade.” She wants a more traditional approach to teaching math.
Despite her concerns, Ponugoti is hoping to return to public school for high school because private high school tuition is so expensive, and because private schools are often too small to offer good athletic programs.
Cathy Carley, from Fullerton (Orange County), had two children in public school when the pandemic began. Her older daughter was in eighth grade and was able to return to school in a hybrid format in 2020-21; although that wasn’t a great experience, she ultimately chose to attend a public high school. However, Carley’s younger daughter was in third grade and the large class size (33 kids) meant that the district could only open in a hybrid manner, due to social distancing guidelines. Although Carley described the quality of the elementary school as very good, with involved parents, she began to see class size as a big problem during the pandemic. Once her daughter transferred to a private school in spring 2021, she had only 20 students in her class, and Carley saw major academic growth.
Carley stressed that she doesn’t blame the district or school board for this issue: “The problems plaguing our public schools are a direct result of our local and county and state governments that have not prioritized public education,” she said, adding, “at a certain point, parents cannot donate/fundraise enough for all the [staff] that schools need.”
While Carley lives in an affluent public school district, Jamey Johnson-Olney lives in a poorer, more rural part of the state: the Central Valley town of Waterford in Stanislaus County. Her daughter was in eighth grade at the local public school in spring 2020, and when the schools closed, there was no instruction, only work packets. A middle school teacher herself, Johnson-Olney described her daughter as an overachiever with a 4.0 GPA before the pandemic. “I just saw a dramatic turn, where she just refused to do anything at all.” Her daughter would say, “This is not real school. This is busy work, which it really was.” Within a matter of weeks, she said, her active daughter “was just curled up in a ball in a dark bedroom all day long. I thought I was losing my daughter to depression.”
Over the summer Johnson-Olney made sure to get her daughter outdoors, which really helped improve her mood. She was determined to keep her daughter from sliding into depression again, so she enrolled her daughter in a Catholic school that had assured parents they would open as soon as possible. The first two months of Fall 2020 were in distance learning, due to a county mandate that applied to private as well as public schools, but the school opened in November 2020 in hybrid format for two days a week. Despite the surge in January 2021, the school decided to open up five days a week for half-days.
Johnson-Olney’s daughter really liked the Catholic school, especially because it was more academically challenging for her, but it was a 45-minute drive to get there, which was hard on the family. Ultimately she herself decided to switch back to her neighborhood public high school. Nonetheless, it’s a high-poverty rural school, said Johnson-Olney, so the classes are less challenging and there are more behavioral issues. But because her daughter will be a junior next year, they’ve decided to stick it out and focus on keeping grades up so she can get into a good college.
Johnson-Olney’s story is an example of a family that went private during school closures and have ultimately decided to return to public school. Michelle Koskella, from Burlingame (San Mateo County), offers an example of a family that switched from private to public school because of the overly draconian pandemic restrictions her son’s private school implemented. He was finishing fifth grade when the pandemic began and was headed toward a different, private middle school. Now, he’s going into eighth grade and he’ll be going to public school this fall.
Koskella thought the private school would handle the pandemic well: “They talk about child-centered [approaches], nurturing the creative mind and hands-on learning. I thought, ‘they're gonna make it all about the kids, they're gonna do so great.’” Instead, the school stalled—it didn’t file for a waiver to start in-person school when it could have in Fall 2020, so it opened later. “It just seems like at every turn, when they could, they were perfectly within their rights within the county and state rules to make things looser and open up, they went extreme,” said Koskella. For example, the school had mandatory outdoor masking until March 2022, and would require families to take PCR tests after each school break, which would often result in kids missing school days. The younger kids, in K-4, were never allowed to unmask in the 2021-22 school year. “How crazy is that?” she asked, “The little kids are the ones who need the masks off more than anybody.”
Koskella’s son wanted to finish out eighth grade at his private school, and then head to a public high school, but she talked him out of it. She said that when she had to commit to the private school tuition for this coming academic year, she saw that the restrictions wouldn’t be going away, and didn’t want to pay for private school anymore. She wishes the school had been more up front with parents about setting strict policies: “If they wanna be the most Covid-serious school in the Bay Area, then own it. And the parents who want to pay for that, can.”
*Luna is a pseudonym, as this parent asked to remain anonymous
