The Los Angeles Unified School District finds itself in a difficult, if not unfamiliar position.
Enrollment is down nearly 50% from its high around the turn of the century, with the numbers dropping about 4% from 2024 to 2025 in the most recent figures.
Fewer students equals less state funding, with potential layoffs and school closures looming.
My colleague Howard Blume recently wrote about district officials pressing ahead with a multibillion-dollar modernization and rebuilding plan, raising questions about investing in campuses that soon may be shuttered.
Let’s jump into Blume’s article, get his direct perspective and chat with an expert as LAUSD confronts carrying out a budget-cutting plan to prevent a deficit that, in a worst-case scenario, could increase to $3.5 billion by June 30, 2029.
Money to rebuild South Los Angeles schools
The school district has moved forward with its ongoing school reconstruction and modernization program, backed by $9 billion in voter bonds.
Since June, six South L.A. elementary schools — Menlo Avenue, Normandie Avenue, 93rd Street, 96th Street, 107th Street and 122nd Street — and Harbor City’s Narbonne High School received approval for seismic-risk reconstructions totaling nearly $820 million.
Ultimately, the current and upcoming projects to address seismic safety are expected to cost more than $2 billion.
The debate of rebuilding versus shuttering
The imperative to close all or portions of campuses potentially competes with the concurrent high priority of providing students with safe, up-to-date, fully resourced and inviting educational environments.
Given the years-long time frames needed for construction projects, the district facilities team doesn’t want to delay upgrading facilities in ways that students immediately would benefit from.
The district also is moving quickly to address the risk posed by the so-called lift-slab construction style of many school buildings erected in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
One option would be not to rebuild some of these schools at all — given the district’s excess capacity. But the district does not have a plan for closing campuses.
Enrollment crisis
Since peaking at more than 720,000 K-12 students in 2003, L.A. Unified has lost about 2.3% annually — with the exception of steeper drops during the pandemic and since the start of the second Trump administration last year, according to data from the state Department of Education.
Published enrollment data from the district put transitional kindergarten through 12th-grade enrollment at 378,468.
According to state data from last year, ultra-small elementary schools include Glen Alta in Montecito Heights (55 students); Ann Street in Chinatown (71); Annandale in Eagle Rock (78) and Hillside in Lincoln Heights (96). Wright Middle School in Westchester is down to 435 students. Crenshaw High in Hyde Park is at 423 students.
Blume’s corner
Blume, The Times’ LAUSD beat reporter, believes it’s “vitally important” for the district to focus funding on modernizing schools most likely to remain open.
“This does not appear to be happening because the district is literally spending hundreds of millions of dollars on schools and it has no plan regarding which schools will remain open,” he said.
He noted there remain two important issues the district is addressing in very different ways.
He said there is an “entirely legitimate need” to maintain and improve schools, buoyed by voter-approved school bonds paid through property taxes. The pot of money is ample but not suited for long-term facility needs, he said.
Conversely, the second imperative is a “need to consolidate programs and close portions of campuses or entire campuses,” Blume said. The district is half the size it was two decades ago.
Small schools might sound ideal, but Blume points out that they are expensive and offer fewer classes at the middle and high school level and combined courses in elementary programs.
“The cost of operating schools falls on the side of the budget where money is tight, and thousands of job cuts and layoffs are in the budget plan for the next three years,” he said.
Closing schools is never an easy choice
Kyo Yamashiro, an associate professor at Loyola Marymount’s School of Education, said closing schools is “one of the most politically charged decisions that a school district can face.”
“No one wants to close schools, especially those with long histories of serving their communities over generations and decades,” Yamashiro emailed The Times. “So these decisions are typically not taken lightly.”
Yamashiro said some districts turn to a demographer. This individual can map the demographic trends across neighborhoods and help systems make enrollment zoning decisions that can shift zones or consolidate to nearby schools as enrollment declines. The method is meant to stave off closures.
“That isn’t always an option,” she said. “Also, the fact that there are fixed costs to operating a school puts a strain on budgets as enrollment dwindles, since enrollment is not dwindling necessarily in nice, neat packages of families that would allow for a school to easily remove one full class/grade/teacher, for example.”
Check out the full article here.
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