Credit: Allison Shelley for American Education
Falling enrollments and gloomy economics point to the inevitable: Many school districts in California will close schools over the next decade. So far, they have been mainly elementary and middle schools, but high schools, spared until now, won’t escape, a newly released study by a national research and consulting organization concluded.
Rather than view closures solely as retrenchment and loss, the authors view “this period of fiscal transition” as an opportunity for districts to redesign high schools that are more engaging for students.
“This is sorely needed,” wrote researchers Paul Beach and Carrie Hahnel of Bellwether Education Partners, a national nonprofit research and consulting firm. “Educators, policymakers, and researchers increasingly agree: The structure of high school must change.”
High school students won’t dispute that. Significant proportions of high school students have signaled they feel disconnected from school, the report notes. One-quarter were chronically absent, and only half said they had a caring relationship with a teacher or another adult at school, according to the state’s latest Healthy Kids Survey.
The paradox is that redesigning schools “often requires more money, not less,” they wrote, but the transformation is doable through strategies that could include redoing traditional seven-period schedules, expanding dual-enrollment courses with community colleges and apprenticeship opportunities, and creating hubs within a district where multiple high schools can share facilities and courses. Partnerships with government agencies, businesses and nonprofits can help shift expenses, and money from the sale of properties can help pay for new initiatives, like staff housing, they wrote.
The report, “Navigating Change: Strategies to Strengthen California High Schools Amid Declining Enrollment,” cites examples of districts that are adopting new models, like San Francisco Unified’s health and life sciences learning hub. It offers half-day programs at the University of California San Francisco Mission Bay campus for students in five district high schools with the outside funding that will survive as the district faces a massive deficit and school closings.
One way or another, consolidations will happen. After peaking at 6.3 million students in 2005, California’s enrollment has gradually been falling, and hastened by the pandemic, was 5.8 million in 2023-24. The California Department of Finance projects an additional 11% drop of 647,000 students; by 2032, there will be 5.2 million students overall.
California’s declining student enrollment
California student enrollment, 2000-’01 to 2023-’24, with projections through 2044-’45
As a declining birth rate and fewer immigrants work their way through the system, high schools will feel the impact last, the report said. And those closings will be the hardest to pull off, with the most community resistance.
More so than with elementary and middle schools, people have stronger emotional attachments to high schools because that’s where they come of age. They’re their alma maters; their auditoriums, stadiums, gymnasiums and classrooms are after-hours community facilities.
Districts will more likely cram in middle schools to keep high schools going, said Ron Carruth, who retired as superintendent of El Dorado Union High School District this year and is now the executive director of the California High School Coalition, a new organization that is looking at best practices and new ideas for high schools.
At some point, resistance will face reality, and districts will have to ask, “Is this a doom cycle?” Carruth said. “There will be a point where a good AP program and challenging academic and career pathways will require a certain size,” Carruth said. “Smaller than that, a school cannot be everything for everybody, particularly in rural areas.”
Beach and Hahnel, who previously held leadership roles in two California education policy nonprofits — the Opportunity Institute and Education Trust-West — urge districts to get busy on how to consolidate programs and redeploy staff.
The Legislature can help by revising state laws that “collectively stifle innovation and create a rigid high school structure,” the report said. At its meeting this month, the State Board of Education discussed potentially granting districts waivers from minimum instructional minutes to accommodate learning opportunities outside the traditional school. It plans to explore the idea further.
The report recommends re-adopting the expired pandemic-era relaxation of state laws to simplify selling surplus property so that districts can develop or lease school properties for staff housing, child care centers, or centers operated by local health agencies and nonprofits without red tape.
Added importance of partnerships
New partnerships will be critical to expanding student opportunities and reducing costs. The study points to some groundbreaking examples:
The city of Inglewood is spending $40 million to redesign its main library as an education and innovation center for two high schools in Inglewood Unified, which has experienced a massive, decadelong enrollment drop. The project will include a bridge linking the library to a nearby high school to ensure safe passage.
High schools and community colleges can both qualify for funding for dual enrollment courses through the College and Career Access Pathways program, especially when college professors teach courses on high school campuses.
Napa Unified is among the districts whose community schools have tapped into the state’s $4.7 billion Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative to create onsite wellness centers and expand mental health services at their high schools — facilities and programs the district could not afford on its own.
“It would be a huge benefit if you can put outside health-care and academic providers on high school campuses as they shrink,” said Carruth. “Look for synergies.”
Carruth pointed to the passage of Senate Bill 1244, authored by Sen. Josh Newman, D-Fullerton, which the coalition encouraged as a big step in the right direction. Signed into law this month, it removes a restriction that had limited dual-enrollment partnerships to a community college district closest to a school district. The new law will allow districts to enter agreements with other community colleges for courses that the local district cannot or chooses not to offer. “SB 1244 will change the lives of hundreds of thousands of students,” especially in urban areas, where students have lacked a range of dual-enrollment options, said Carruth, who added it may take a few years to reach its potential.
But beyond the issue of school closing, what’s urgently needed is to step back for a big-picture look at high schools, he said.
The Newsom administration has done “amazing things for younger kids,” Carruth said, by expanding child care and adding a new grade of transitional kindergarten. “But there has been no similar vision and investments for high schools.”
Roxann Nazario, a parent advocate and organizer from Los Angeles, said she is disappointed that schools didn’t become more innovative after the pandemic revealed structural weaknesses.
“Why aren’t we capitalizing to make schools more flexible for kids? I am frustrated they have not evolved,” said Nazario, who was interviewed by the Bellwether authors.
She points to her daughter Scarlett, an artistic high school junior, possibly with undiagnosed mild autism, who has struggled to find a school where she can thrive academically and creatively. Ideally, she would be able to take core classes in which she struggles at one school and another school that’s strong in the arts, like Champs Charter High in Los Angeles, where she went last year.
“A flexible model would meet kids where they are,” she said. “We just settle for what is and don’t push for what’s best.”
The cost of transporting students to other districts and current funding laws will be obstacles. There is currently no provision for dividing daily per-student funding among districts. A district that offers a minimum of four classes per day receives full funding. But there are discussions to lower the minimum reimbursement to three classes per day to encourage more dual enrollment programs, and that could open the door to further options, Carruth said.
The state should also re-examine the Local Control Funding Formula, which Carruth said has shortchanged high schools since its adoption a decade ago. The authors of the formula simply added 20% more funding to the base funding amount for seventh and eighth graders to determine high school funding per student. The rationale was that high schools were required to offer 20% more instructional minutes than middle schools.
“That (falsely) assumes high school is just a bigger middle school,” Carruth said. “We made a mistake during the creation of (the funding formula) that we didn’t adjust what it costs to run a high school.”
But with budget forecasters projecting stable, if not lean years ahead, high schools probably won’t get an infusion of funding any time soon. Meanwhile, dropping enrollments, which will lead to declining revenue in many districts, will underscore the study’s call for rethinking how to spend the limited funding high schools will receive.
“There’s a pent-up demand for re-envisioning high school,” Carruth said.
Added Nazario, “Many kids are just getting by, not thriving.”
