Pleasanton Unified School District has lost approximately 700 students over the past five years, particularly at the elementary and middle school levels, according to an annual enrollment presentation delivered at a recent Board of Trustees meeting.
According to the report given on Feb. 10, enrollment at PUSD fluctuated over a five-year period spanning 2017 to 2022, but has dropped off significantly over the past two years. Peak enrollment during that same period was 14,958, with an increase of 112 students during the 2018-19 school year, then dropping off every year since.
A demographer’s enrollment figures from January 2021 projected an additional approximately 400 students — a total of 14,403 students — for districtwide enrollment in fall 2021. The district originally anticipated receiving 5,975 students for elementary instruction this year, but there are currently 5,677 students enrolled in elementary at PUSD (about 300 fewer than was expected).
When the pandemic hit during the 2019-20 school year, 102 students unenrolled from PUSD, and since then has lost nearly 800 more students. Last year 414 more students left the district, followed by another 376 students during the current school year.
Elementary enrollment peaked with 6,252 students enrolled in grades 1 to 5 in the 2018-19 school year. There are 5,677 elementary students currently enrolled for the 2021-22 school year at PUSD.
Middle school enrollment has declined steadily since 2016, when 3,715 students were enrolled in middle school. When schools reopened for in-person learning last year, 3,412 students were enrolled in middle school at PUSD — a slight decrease from 3,541 students that were enrolled the year before. Enrollment is currently at 3,385 middle school students.
High school enrollment peaked during the 2019-20 school year with 5,133 students enrolled, and has declined by about 100 students since then to a current enrollment of 5,004 students.
Transitional kindergarten (TK) enrollment has stayed level over the past five years, with 171 students currently enrolled. At its peak during the 2019-20 school year, TK had 184 students enrolled.
Trustee Steve Maher asked about projections for TK enrollment, and assistant superintendent of student support services Ed Diolazo said, “Usually we can get a little bit of an estimate as to who’s coming in but this year it’s really been difficult, that’s my honest answer, in terms of what the TK numbers will look like.”
“We hope and anticipate that there will be more TK and K students that come in but … it’s hard to project when the numbers were so depressed this year for TK and K because those kids are what we use to project the next year,” Diolazo said. “Our kinders and our first grade are a little bit depressed in terms of what we’re projecting because if the kids come back to what we’re used to from a couple years ago, then those numbers will increase and so forth.”
Current racial and ethnic data also shows exactly half of the district’s students are Asian, while white students make up 30% of the population, followed by Hispanic students (10%), students identifying as two or more races (6%), Filipinos (2%), and African American students (1%). Another 1% of students declined to state their racial or ethnic makeup.
Trustee Joan Laursen said the district seemed “under-enrolled in our dual immersion program, and that’s quite a change since we used to have a long, long waiting list for that program.”
“I’m wondering if this has something to do with the changing of our ethnicity,” Laursen said. “When you look back 10 years, we had a higher proportion of white students who maybe wanted to be participating in our Spanish dual immersion program versus today we have a higher percentage of Asian students who may or may not be interested in that program as much.”
Laursen also requested “some additional information about the status of our Spanish dual immersion program as we move forward, and what are the plans for that,” as well as plans for a Mandarin dual immersion program.
Trustee Kelly Mokashi noted that in the district’s choice areas for enrollment “there’s a higher percentage of students choosing Amador versus Foothill” high school. Though PUSD does not collect information about why students choose what school they attend, student board member Saachi Bhayani offered some insight.
“The Fairlands neighborhood, a lot of those kids choose to go to Foothill because they’re going to Hart, so then most of Hart goes to Foothill, so everyone they know is going to Foothill,” Bhayani said. “But a lot of people do keep the same friend groups from elementary school in the Fairlands friend group, which are all in the same choice area, so they all go to Amador because Amador is significantly closer.”
