School District Told to Expect Declining Student Enrollment

• Additional Tax Dollars May Be Used to Fund More Out-of-District Students to Fill Seats

BY BILL KOENEKER

The Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District Board of Education met last week in Malibu. The board has scheduled four of its regularly scheduled 31 meetings or programs for the 2007-2008 academic calendar to be held in Malibu.
On the board agenda it was simply called commendations, Webster Elementary School, but in fact it was a full show-and-tell by Webster students and Principal Phil Cott, who demonstrated some of school’s hands-on educational ventures, including a kindergarten class, studying Mandarin Chinese, that danced to a Chinese song in costume, and a fifth grade class that dressed in full costume as colonists during the early days of the nation.
Superintendent Dianne Talarico said she had recently visited the school and was especially fond of the poetry garden. She added she had also visited the Chinese language class.
“You have a great school and interesting leadership. I have great respect for Mr. Cott, even though we don’t see eye to eye,” she said.
Cott said, as a prelude to when the board was to later discuss declining enrollment, that he thought a less stringent permit policy would be welcome by him and others.
“At Webster we are very accepting to fill spaces, to have low income families who work in Malibu and bring their children to the community. They offer a diversity and a real bit of reality,” he said.
Cott went on to state the defining event for the school this year was the fire that almost burned the campus and how five Webster families lost homes.
Upon questioning by board president Oscar de la Torre, Cott also talked about how a group of day laborers wanted to donate time and effort to the community and school after the fire.
“I expected maybe 10 or 20 people. They assembled over 100 workers. The Wall Street Journal was there, La Opinion and several Spanish language television newscasters. I spoke to them via a translator. They started chanting. They placed sandbags. They cut back blackened landscaping. They really helped a lot,” Cott added.
Board members, after hearing a request from Malibu parent Colleen Baum about the accountability of Measure BB expenses, agreed that regular reporting of the expenses should and would be undertaken.
The board heard little and talked less about the passage of Measure R, expect from a Santa Monica parent, who offered what could only be called the Santa Monica slant on the issue.
“This started before Measure R. The kids need stability and predictability. With the passage of Measure R, our schools have the assurance of fundraising and staffing. Much of the heavy lifting was done by the PTAs. It was so much more intensive that anyone imagined. The election was more about community, not about two communities. We are one school community. We can overcome our differences. If we turn on each other, our children will be the losers. We need to do it as one community,” she said.
The board then heard from demographics consultants DecisionInsite from Orange County about the rapidly declining enrollment over the next four years in the school district.
The consultants provided the board with what they called two sets of projections. A conservative one that could be used for budgetary planning purposes and another version that could be applicable for construction planning.
In considerable detail, the consultants explained how the figures were arrived at using live births, which are going down, and a host of other variables.
Another aspect of the decline, according to consultants, unique to the district is there was no “hump” in enrollment from K-8 to high school.
“You would expect kids from private schools to go to public high school, but that is not happening in your district,” one consultant added.
Other population variables are easier to explain. “The community in the district is aging. Growth of the communities is slowing,” said a consultant, who added another reason for decline. “[Out-of-area] permit students are declining [because of district policy].”
The consultants, in their presentation, stressed that their numbers are based not only on enrollment in prior years, but on outside factors related to the census data.
The information is important, according to the staff, since the data for staffing allocations will be used for the 2008- 2009 school year.
The consultants had come up with the conservative and moderate projections because the board had asked for the long-range data not only to make accurate staffing projections, but also to examine the projects included in the Measure BB facilities program.
The staff recommended using the conservative projections for staffing allocations and the moderate projects for the planning of construction.
Another consultant had done enrollment projections for Measure BB, but Assistant Superintendent Mike Matthews said staffers wanted to know how accurate those numbers were and had hired DecisionInsite to do a “much deeper analysis.”
The consultants said that, according to one forecast, in five years the district will have an enrollment of 93 percent of what it is today.
Another forecast, using other variables, found that in five years the district will have 85 percent of what it has today.
The consultants ticked off a list of how they believe events will unfold: Live births are going down. The decline will happen in coastal areas and Los Angeles County. Within two areas of the district there is modest growth, but the persons per household rate is in decline. Santa Monica and Malibu are at a point where the community is aging, which is in part a function of the economy. All of these variables relate to student population, which in turn means the district is not growing.
The decline in enrollment reverses or picks up in 2010. California live births will start to pick up later, which is good news for schools, but consultants are not sure if that will happen in the SMMUSD.