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Public school enrollment decline is steepest in LAUSD and L.A. County

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Schools in Los Angeles County and especially those in the L.A. Unified School District are seeing the steepest decline in enrollment in California, based on new state data posted Thursday.

Across California, enrollment dropped by 1.3% — about 75,000 students — over the last year, a percentage decline that is about average compared with 39 states that have so far released enrollment figures for the current school year. All 39 have recorded enrollment decreases, based on an analysis by the California Department of Education. States with a larger percentage decline include Hawaii, New Hampshire and New York.

“Declining school enrollment in California reflects the national trend,” said Elizabeth Sanders, a spokesperson for the state Department of Education. In addition, “the data shows that some California families are relocating to less expensive suburban communities like Elk Grove and Vacaville.”

The statewide figures correlate to declining birth rates nationwide, although other factors are in play locally, including in Los Angeles County, such as housing costs, a decline in immigration and aggressive federal efforts to deport undocumented immigrants.

“There are some surprises in these data, but the decline itself shouldn’t be surprising,” said Thomas J. Kane, director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard. “Declining birth rates inevitably mean declining enrollment. The size of the decline should be manageable — but only if schools adjust their plans now, rather than wait.”

Typical ways of coping with declining enrollment including closing schools and reducing the number of employees. Both are painful measures for school communities and have been resisted in the Los Angeles Unified School District and elsewhere.

This week, LAUSD officials just barely headed off a strike by agreeing to significant employee raises as well as by rescinding about 200 layoffs and agreeing to hundreds of new hires of counselors, school psychologists and other student support staff. The school system has not identified campuses that could be closed.

Los Angeles County, with 80 school districts, has far more students than any other California county, so its effect on statewide enrollment always will be significant. Over the last year enrollment drops were pronounced, pulling down statewide numbers.

Los Angeles County public school enrollment for the 2025-26 academic year decreased from the prior year by 32,953 students, or 2.6%, to 1,242,816. That drop would equate to the disappearance of the entire Moreno Valley Unified School District, which is one of the 25 largest school systems in the state.

The county decrease represents 44% of the statewide decline. By comparison, the county comprises about 22% of the state’s students.

For L.A. Unified, the decline was 16,765 students, or 4.5%. L.A. Unified’s share of the statewide decrease is 22.4%. The district has about 7% of the state’s public school students.

Per the state numbers, the L.A. Unified enrollment is 353,065 and was 369,830 last year.

L.A. Unified has a different and larger enrollment figure based on a different tabulation system, but the percentage decrease is similar to what the state calculated — and it was no surprise to district officials when asked for their reaction.

District officials also noted state figures showing that enrollment is lower, too, for homeschooling, private schools and charter schools. Charters are privately operated public schools.

“Los Angeles Unified’s enrollment trends reflect the same broader demographic shifts impacting school systems across California and the nation,” officials said in a statement. “Enrollment declined across all school types this year, driven largely by long-term factors such as declining birth rates and changes in migration patterns due to cost of living.”

“Like other large urban districts, Los Angeles Unified is also navigating additional local pressures, including housing affordability and the impact of federal immigration enforcement policies, which have contributed to a more pronounced decline in our communities.”

School district critics say the management of the school system itself must bear some blame, although demographic experts lend support to the district analysis.

It’s “quite possible that some of this decline is driven by the increased scale and intensity of immigration enforcement,” said Stanford University professor Thomas S. Dee. “I’ve found in prior research that immigration enforcement reduces enrollment by causing some to flee and deterring newcomers.”

In terms of raw numbers, Santa Ana Unified, which lost 2,291 students, follows L.A. Unified in declining enrollment. That’s a 6.4% drop since last year. Immigration enforcement also has fallen heavily on families in that school system.

School systems with higher enrollment include Elk Grove Unified, which gained 1,097 students, a 1.7% increase. Vacaville Unified enrolled 557 more students, a 4.9% increase. Counties with higher enrollment included San Joaquin, Placer and Sutter.

Mixed picture for private and home schooling

There was a year-over-year decline across all school types.

Schools operated by traditional school districts dropped 1.4%, almost exactly the same as the statewide numbers. This reflects that most students, about 5.73 million, are in public schools.

Charter schools dropped slightly statewide, about 0.3%.

The number of students being homeschooled dropped 3.7%. For data purposes, a home school is defined as a private school with fewer than six students. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, in the 2018-19 school year, there were just under 25,000 homeschoolers. The number peaked in 2020-21, at the height of the pandemic campus closures, at nearly 60,000. The current figure is 49,365.

Private school enrollment dropped 6.6% compared with last year; it’s now a little less than before the pandemic.

In 2018-19, private school enrollment approached 500,000. Enrollment dropped early in the pandemic, then peaked in 2022-23. The current enrollment is 461,650 students, a decrease of 32,814 from last year.

In the big picture, said Stanford’s Dee, “we see continued evidence that the families that left the public school system during the pandemic haven’t really returned.”

UC Berkeley education professor Bruce Fuller focused on the recent private school decline, noting that “fewer parents appear able to afford private schools.”

He also was drawn to another figure — an increase in the number of families taking advantage of transitional kindergarten, which became fully available across the state to 4-year-olds for the current school year.

That enrollment figure is 213,313, up 20.1% over last year.

“Free TK is growing in popularity, especially among middle-income Angelenos who earlier faced daunting child-care bills,” Fuller said. “The downside is that scores of nonprofit preschools have gone under after losing their 4-year-olds.”

Overall, the declining birth rate “continues to wreak havoc with the fragile vitality of public schools,” Fuller added. “The irony is that steadily rising education attainment, notably enjoyed by young Latina mothers, leads to bearing fewer children.”

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Elderly couple dies in Santa Monica home fire

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The Santa Monica Fire Department is investigating an early-morning blaze on Sunday that claimed the lives of an elderly couple living in a two-story home.

The department has yet to release the identities of the victims who lived in the older English Tudor-style home in the 500 block of Lincoln Boulevard, but their relatives have been notified, according to A Platoon Battalion Chief James Altman.

Firefighters responded to a call shortly before 3 a.m. and found the home engulfed in flames.

Altman said fire crews found two bodies in the first-floor bedroom of the residence. The victims were pronounced dead at the scene.

The couple at the residence were in their 90s and usually had a caretaker with them. But no one was on duty at the time, Altman said.

The department has yet to determine a cause for the fire, Altman said.

The Lincoln Boulevard blaze was Santa Monica’s second fatal residential blaze in recent months. An elderly man died after a June 5 fire broke out in a second-floor apartment in a building in the 2600 block of 5th Street.

News

Israel Rejects Trump’s 15-Point Plan to Disarm Hamas

President Trump’s Board of Peace announced an agreement last month that aimed at Hamas’s giving up its weapons alongside an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

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Astronomers Find a New Object from the Early Universe Using Webb Data

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Since it became operational in 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has released some truly breathtaking views of the cosmos. These images highlight how advancements since the days of the venerable Hubble Space Telescope are now providing the deepest and clearest views of the cosmos to date. This was especially evident with the galaxy cluster MACS J0308.9+2645, a deep field image originally taken by Hubble showcasing galaxy clusters and several gravitational lenses.

These lenses, in turn, revealed even more distant galaxies that existed 13 billion years ago, when the Universe was just 1 billion years old. These galaxies appear as distorted “gravitational arcs” in the image, their light having been warped and amplified by the MACS J0308.9+2645 cluster’s gravitational field. As it turns out, there were more galaxies remaining to be found. In a recent paper, astrophysicist Homer Dávila Gutierrez identified another gravitational arc candidate in the galaxy cluster MACS J0308.9+2645.

Dr. Gutierrez is the founder and director of SKYCR.ORG, the leading Spanish-language news source for astronomy and space exploration, the first Costa Rican elected Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (FRAS), and a member of the European Astronomical Society (EAS). He reported the finding of the arc candidate (A1) after searching through JWST archival Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) data gathered through Webb’s General Observation (GO) 5293 campaign.

A conceptual diagram of the gravitational lens system MG J0414+0534. Credit: NAOJ, K. T. Inoue

Gravitational lenses are a phenomenon originally predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, in which objects with mass alter the curvature of spacetime around them. When light intersects with a gravitational field, it traces this curvature, which amplifies and distorts it. For decades, astronomers have used these lenses (created by objects in the foreground) to observe light from more distant, fainter objects located behind them.

The galaxy candidate Dr. Gutierrez observed is characteristic of this phenomenon, having an elongated and curved morphology. He found A1 while searching through 54 public JWST/NIRCam fields and evaluating 1,591 possible candidates. Of these, only A1 was considered a robust candidate for a gravitational arc that could have existed when the Universe was very young. As Dr. Gutierrez told Universe Today via email, there are three things that make A1 stand out from the rest:

First, its geometry: A1 is extremely elongated (axis ratio ~6.5) and aligned tangentially with respect to the cluster center to within about a degree – exactly the orientation gravitational lensing produces. Second, its brightness: it is the brightest of the highly elongated sources at that radius, which made it measurable. And third, its absence from every catalog: it does not appear in the published strong-lensing inventory of this cluster, nor in SIMBAD, NED, or VizieR. \

When I contacted the GO-5293 team, they confirmed it did not overlap with the systems they were analyzing. A real, bright, uncatalogued arc-like source in a massive Planck-selected cluster – that is what made it worth pursuing.

After conducting a multi-band analysis with the EAZY (Easy and Accurate Zphot from Yale) photometric tool, Dr. Gutierrez obtained a redshift value of z ≈ 4.4, placing A1 within the first billion years of the Universe. This was followed by analysis with the tool developed by Israeli astrophysicist Ana Acebron and collaborators in 2018 that placed constraints on the mass of the MACS J0308.9+2645 cluster. From this, he determined that A1 was subject to a magnification factor of seven.

The little red dots could represent galaxies in an evolutionary phase predating the luminous quasar phase. Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/ISTA)/ETH Zurich/NAOJ

While the analysis is evolving and follow-up observations are needed, there are still some characteristics that can be gleaned from the data. Said Dr, Gutierrez:

With the corrected photometry, A1 is a galaxy at z ≈ 1.4 — we see it as it was roughly 9 billion years ago — lying behind the cluster MACS J0308.9+2645 (z = 0.356), one of the most massive clusters known. Its light passed close to the cluster on its way to us, and the working interpretation, shared by the program team’s lensing experts, is that it is a singly lensed image: stretched and modestly magnified by the cluster’s gravity, but not multiply imaged.

Its projected position, about 51 arcseconds from the cluster’s X-ray center, and its tangential elongation are consistent with that picture. The definitive test — an updated lens model of the cluster built from the new JWST data — is in progress.

The analysis also revealed a second potential candidate, designed A2, which has similar geometry to A1. This light source is significantly fainter, smaller, more elongated, and its photometry is less constrained. It also has a similar projected distance from the central cluster as A1. “And that matters: the photometric issue that affected A1’s original redshift estimate — catalog aperture magnitudes that capture only a small fraction of an extended source’s light — applies even more strongly to a faint source like A2. So I treat its nature and redshift as open questions pending the same corrected reanalysis I applied to A1,” said Dr. Gutierrez.

The exciting thing about these results is that they imply that there could be many more early galaxy candidates hiding in Webb’s data.

Webb’s public archive is growing faster than anyone can fully exploit, and this find shows that genuine discoveries are sitting in already-released data, accessible to any researcher willing to do careful work. But there is a second lesson, just as important: automated catalog photometry can badly mislead you for extended sources — in this case it initially suggested a much higher redshift — so verification, independent remeasurement, and contact with the original program team are essential.

The most rewarding part of this process has been exactly that: the GO-5293 team responded generously, confirmed the object was uncatalogued, and we are now working with their updated lens model to establish A1’s nature definitively. Independent researchers and program teams collaborating over public data — that is Webb’s archive working exactly as intended.

The work is currently being reviewed for publication in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan.

Further Reading: arXiv, SKYCR