School District Told to Expect Declining
Student Enrollment
• Additional Tax Dollars May Be Used
to Fund More Out-of-District Students to Fill Seats
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.
