Enrollment Decline Can’t Be Explained Away by Shift to Private Schools, Homeschooling

Last month we published a piece diving into the stark reality of enrollment decline. There are nearly 30,000 fewer kids in San Diego County public schools than there were a decade ago. State officials project that over the next 20 years, enrollment at local schools will drop by another 112,000 students. That would wipe out nearly 30 percent of San Diego County’s enrollment. 

Educators are so stressed about the phenomenon because it will almost certainly lead to the closure of schools across the county, from Encinitas, where enrollment has dropped by 21 percent, to Alpine, where it has fallen by 15 percent to South Bay Union, where it has plummeted by 37 percent.  

There’s also not much educators can do, because the main engines of the drops – declining birth rates and sky-high costs of living – are largely out of their control. 

Sweetwater Union High School District Superintendent Moises Aguirre described the trend as a “slow moving train wreck.” Something you can see coming from afar, but is happening slowly, making it hard to really understand. 

Sweetwater has lost nearly 13 percent of its students over the past decade. The worst may be yet to come, because Sweetwater can sort of see its future. Enrollment at most of the elementary school districts that feed into the high school district is falling even faster than Sweetwater’s. 

That can be difficult to explain to community members, though, who see new housing popping up all over Chula Vista. 

“It takes people a significant amount of time to start absorbing the reality,” Aguirre said. “People generally think there’s always going to be more money, more people, more students. That’s the underlying assumption, so for us to say that assumption is no longer true … it’s a difficult change in how people see the world.”  

Understanding exactly what’s driving these trends is vital if there’s any hope to slow, or even reverse them. But our age of polarization and rising anti-public school sentiment makes it difficult for many to really grasp. That reality was clear in some of the responses to my initial piece.  

Readers contacted me with their own theories about why enrollment was declining. One of those theories was that parents had abandoned public schools in favor of private schools and homeschools.  

Yes, there are more kids attending private schools and being homeschooled, but that doesn’t account for the overall drop in enrollment.  

Not even close. 

Private Schools and Private Homeschools 

California doesn’t publish data on how many kids are homeschooled. Instead, the state includes those figures in its private school data and classifies homeschools as private schools with five or fewer children. Over the past decade, that has fluctuated wildly.  

In 2014, about 2,228 children in San Diego County were homeschooled. By 2020, when schools shut their doors during the pandemic, that number more than doubled to 5,525. Over the intervening years, the number of children homeschooled has remained higher than pre-pandemic levels but slumped down to 4,251. The number of kids attending private schools, however, has stayed basically flat.  

And while the movement toward homeschooling is noticeable, the share of students actually being privately homeschooled countywide is still miniscule – less than one percent. In 2014, only .41 percent of local students were homeschooled and 6.74 attended private schools. Last year, only .82 percent were homeschooled and 7.16 percent attended private schools. 

“It’s not insignificant, but it doesn’t explain where all of the public school kids are going,” said Alexander Alvarado, who puts together projections of student populations for California’s Department of Finance. 

Homeschool Charters 

That said, there have been some significant changes to the homeschooling landscape that make that data an undercount. The popularity of virtual instruction has exploded in recent years, and so has the number of charter schools offering what is essentially a guided homeschooling experience. 

Kids who attend these sorts of programs don’t get included in the private homeschool count, but they do get included in counts of charter school enrollment. In fact, schools like this are a big reason why we’ve seen a massive spike in the number of students enrolled in charter schools over the past decade. Two virtual homeschool charters now enroll about 12,500 students, which amounts to about 14 percent of kids enrolled at San Diego County charters. 

But I need to add another big asterisk here. These sorts of virtual schools often allow students in neighboring counties to enroll. In the case of Pacific Coast Academy and Cabrillo Point Academy, the two charters who together enroll 12,500 students, they welcome kids from Riverside, Orange and Imperial counties , meaning many of their students don’t live in San Diego. That means the enrollment data may actually be an overcount, and at the very least throws a significant wrench in enrollment calculations. 

But despite the number wrangling, the basic fact of enrollment decline remains true. 

The number of students enrolled at local public schools – which includes district-run and charter schools – has decreased by 27,004 students over the past decade. When you add private schools and homeschooling into the mix, the figure barely budges, inching down just slightly to a 24,446-student decrease. 

It all points to a very simple conclusion – there are just fewer kids in San Diego County than there used to be. 

Declining Birth Rates, Migration and Immigration 

While factors like homeschooling can’t explain away enrollment decline, birth rates get us much closer to an answer. Ever since the Great Recession of the late aughts, San Diegans, and Americans more broadly, have been having fewer children.  

The CDC announced earlier this year that the U.S. birth rate had reached yet another record low last year. In 2023, the latest year on record, the number of children born in San Diego County hit the lowest point in more than 30 years.  

The trend is, in part, fueled by a decline in unwanted pregnancies. But a growing number of Americans just don’t seem to want kids for a lot of pretty understandable reasons. People often cite a lack of support, concerns about climate change or the state of the world or career priorities as reasons.  

Then, there’s the price tag. 

Having kids is extremely expensive. Heck, being alive is extremely expensive. The cost of everything from housing to food has shot up in recent years and wages just haven’t kept up. Those concerns about being able to make ends meet have meant that even some people who want kids have decided not to have them. 

Even given the reality of declining births, San Diego County’s population has grown until relatively recently. That’s partly because births have outpaced deaths in the region, but also because net migration historically added thousands of people to the region each year. Not anymore. Over the past decade, the region’s population has stayed relatively flat.  

But for a number of years starting during the pandemic, the county’s population shrunk because more people were leaving the region than were moving to it. The primary reason for that exodus seems to be that the county’s already high cost-of-living begun to grow even faster, chasing residents away to more affordable regions.  

Last year, San Diego County once again grew – but only barely. The county may not be able to rely on that growth to continue, though, because it was largely thanks to a group now squarely in the crosshairs of the Trump administration: foreign-born immigrants.  

Altogether, these trends, decreased net migration, declining births and immigration uncertainty, have conspired to put an end to decades of rapid growth in San Diego County. And even during the brief blips of growth, enrollment at county schools kept declining, pushed on by the larger inertia of these trends.  

Unless something massive changes, Alvarado, the projectionist at the Department of Finance said, there’s no indication the bleed will stop. 

“It’s sort of unprecedented. We haven’t been in a situation where enrollment is shrinking. So, we’re kind of uncharted waters,” Alvarado said.