Sonoma Valley public schools suffer from declining enrollment, like every school district in Sonoma County. Countywide, enrollment has dropped steadily – by roughly 2,000 students – in the past few years. In some areas, that’s meant closure for low-enrollment schools.
Here in Sonoma Valley, the enrollment figure for the current 2008-2009 school year totals 4,741 students, a decrease of 562 students since the high in 1997-1998. This is a drop of about 10 percent, but Louann Carlomagno, Director of Curriculum and Instruction for the Sonoma Valley Unified School District, doesn’t see this as cause for concern.
“If you look at changing demographics and declining enrollment you’ll see that Sonoma mirrors what’s going on throughout the county,” said Carlomagno. “And while enrollment has a direct effect on budget, declining enrollment doesn’t mean you can’t offer a quality program.”
Carlomagno should know. Her entire family is a product of Sonoma public schools, including herself, her husband and their three children. Her two oldest children have graduated from the Sonoma Valley High School and are enrolled in college. Her youngest is currently a sophomore at the high school.
According to the California Budget Project’s November 2008 report, California’s public school enrollment has slowed in recent years, after two decades of considerable growth. Between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s, the number of students attending California’s public schools increased at an average annual rate of 4.4 percent. A small decline was recorded in the late 1970s only to rebound during the 1980s. Enrollment leveled off during the 2003-2004 school year and then began to decline after that.
But if California’s population has increased steadily since 1955, as stated in the report, how can enrollment continue to drop? Several factors can contribute to declining enrollment. Among them are lower birth rates, increased housing prices – which force families to relocate to more affordable states – along with overall population trends and loss of jobs, notably in some rural areas.
Enrollment is a critical factoring in determining school budgets. Because most education funds are distributed on an enrollment basis, the total number of students enrolled per district directly translates into dollars for California’s schools. School budgets include two types of funds: general purpose funds and funds for specific purposes. General purpose funds are calculated on an enrollment basis and support expenses such as teachers and staff, administration, maintenance, utilities and other costs. Each time enrollment drops, so do the dollars used to finance these elements critical to education.
Luckily for California schools, the state projections suggest that enrollment will decline through 2009-2010, but then rise in 2010-2011 and beyond – which could be good news for Sonoma schools.
For Valley schools – the high school in particular – extrapolating enrollment numbers confirms this. By doing a bit of number crunching, it is possible to estimate what Sonoma’s enrollment will look like in the future. From an all-time high of 1,685 students at the high school in 2003-2004, including Creekside High School, enrollment dropped to 1,448 this year. It appears that the numbers will continue to drop – to a low of 1,377 in 2010-2011, then stay at about that level for a few years. Projections beyond that are speculative, at best.
For Sonoma, this means riding out the wave of declining enrollment while finding alternative avenues to stem the tide of potential budget cuts. According to Carlomagno, there are numerous ways to circumnavigate the problem. “There are all sorts of specialized grants for which schools can apply,” says Carlomagno. “For instance, at Sassarini, El Verano and Flowery, we have this incredible after-school program called SHARP where more than 100 students participate. They’re given enrichment, intervention, remediation and classes led by community members. The program is funded through the state – Prop 49 specifically – and available to schools that qualify by having fifty percent of students receiving free or reduced lunch. It’s really a phenomenal program.”
Taking Carlomagno’s advice and seeking extracurricular monies seems the prudent approach to possible upcoming budget cuts and just may be what helps Sonoma Valley schools stay on top.
Cohort analysis
To some, “cohort analysis” would involve study of Roman military strategy, but for analysts working today in demographics, it involves an aggregate of people with some significant circumstance in common, such as birth year, social history, or disease incidence.
In educational systems, this analysis tracks students by class as they work their way through successive grades. This is shown in the accompanying chart of student enrollment in Sonoma Valley by the diagonal rows; each colored diagonal is one cohort, advancing one grade each year.
This approach allows data to be normalized, so that comparisons are not distorted by one student cohort that is particularly large in number, for instance. It also enables more effective planning, as the size of a school is affected just as much by the number of those who graduated, and are no longer at the school, as it is by the number in the entering class.
In this case, a cohort analysis has been used to project the size of Sonoma Valley High School for the next five years, assuming that the size of each cohort changes in a manner similar to the way other cohorts have changed at the same stages in their school career, such as the increase in enrollment as freshmen compared with eighth grade.
Year Grade Level Number of HS students
