K–12 student enrollment nationwide has been declining since in 2019, with traditional school districts bearing the brunt of both a baby bust and a surge in non-district options, public and private. This is clearly evident in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), where you can add negative reactions to Covid school closures and out-migration of families from the city to the list of baleful influences on enrollment in recent years. LAUSD’s elementary schools alone have experienced a 46 percent decline in enrollment from their peak in 2001. While all of this may sound like a clarion call for right-sizing—consolidating students in the best buildings, closing and selling the oldest and least-used, merging academic and extracurricular offerings—that’s not what happened, as a new report lays out in sad detail.
The report comes from Available to All, a nonprofit watchdog dedicated to making sure that public schools live up to their “open to all” mantra. They looked at all LAUSD elementary schools (both district-operated buildings and district-affiliated charters) which were open at the start of the 2024–25 school year and serving grades 2–5, but excluded schools that covered higher grades as well, such as K–8 or K–12 models. Although the majority of elementary schools in Los Angeles are considered magnets that can admit students who reside anywhere in the city, most also operate attendance zones and prioritize admission to students residing in their zones. The same is true for many L.A. charter schools and is the crux of the problem as identified by the researchers. Any elementary school operating with an “exclusionary” attendance zone (in the report’s preferred parlance) was included. The analysis looks at capacity (defined as the highest enrollment previously recorded, although this measure could be problematic), current enrollment, student demographics, and academic performance (defined by percentage of students testing proficient in English for their grade level).
Of the 456 elementary schools included in the sample, almost half (255 buildings) have seen enrollment declines of 50 percent or more since their peak occupancy. In fifty-six of those, the decline has been 70 percent or more. It should be noted that some schools’ “peak enrollment” likely included overcrowded classrooms and/or modular units in the parking lot, which means that some fraction of “peak” is actually better for students. However, as the researchers note, it is the only publicly-available data on maximum capacity in LAUSD buildings and they do attempt to adjust for the possibility of previous overcrowding as best they can. Far less equivocal: Thirty-four buildings have fewer than 200 students enrolled for this current school year. Twenty-nine of these are operating at less than 50 percent of peak, with twelve hovering closer to 25 percent.
On the achievement side, only thirty-nine schools in the sample record English proficiency of 70 percent or more for their students. In these thirty-nine schools, 45 percent of the students are white, while the district’s other 417 schools are only 7 percent white. In fact, twenty-one of these thirty-nine schools are majority white, while only eleven of the district’s hundreds of other schools are majority white.
The thirty-nine highest-performing elementary schools have also bucked the trend of plummeting enrollment, showing a decline of just 5 percent from peak enrollment through 2019 and an additional 8 percent since the pandemic. But they have definitely lost students over time, to the tune of nearly 6,900.
Putting all this together, we get the picture of a lot of empty desks throughout LAUSD, including both the lowest- and the highest-performing elementary buildings. Since all of these schools are designated as magnets—open to families outside the attendance zone—enrollment declines could present the perfect opportunity for families to secure seats for their children in coveted, high-flying schools. But that’s not what the data show. According to the analysts’ estimates—sympathetic to the “peak might be overcrowded” argument—the thirty-nine best-performing schools have room for at least 4,300 more students, but are reporting only fifty-eight seats available for students outside their attendance zones. That’s just 1 percent. And, no surprise, those attendance zones today mirror the race- and income-excluding redlining maps from the 1930s. Things are no better at the district-affiliated charter schools. Analysts called every school, asking about seats for out-of-zone first and fourth grade students. Every school but one reported no available seats—unless students lived in the attendance zone—despite the analysts’ estimate of at least 2,589 empty seats in total based on historical enrollment data. The report suggests that the persistence of these blatant exclusionary tactics could be another reason why Angelenos have been abandoning LAUSD schools in recent years.
The report recommends a set of five reforms to address these longstanding problems. They include allowing families to cross attendance zones if they live within five miles of a given school, publicly reporting buildings’ true maximum capacity, and creating an independent appeals process for any exclusionary denial of enrollment. At least one of them—listing all available seats as open to students from outside the attendance zone—is already required by California law but is largely ignored by schools, so hopes should probably not be high that any of the others will come about either.
One suggestion unfortunately not brought forward in the report: automatic closure for schools whose enrollment falls below a specific threshold (with or without connection to academic quality). LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho is clearly not champing at the bit to do so, having settled a support staff strike in 2023 with a promise to increase hiring, preparing to negotiate with teachers who are also demanding more staff, and saying in a recent interview with The 74 in response to the Available to All report that, “The savings [from closures] are not what people think,” because “students still have to go somewhere” and be served by staff. This new report, showing that LAUSD’s old-timey attendance zones continue to benefit wealthy and white families even in the face of impending enrollment collapse, will likely make no difference. Unless forced to right-size its footprint by outside forces, district leaders clearly intend to keep all their buildings open with full staff rosters and ever-shrinking enrollments…until the students or the money run out. Whichever comes first.
SOURCE: Available to All, “Crisis in the Schoolhouse” (April 2025).
