How changing populations are impacting Santa Rosa City Schools

Classroom at Santa Rosa High School (Reid Heavner, The Puma Prensa)

Written By: Madeleine Smith, business manager

Santa Rosa City Schools is in danger of losing more funding, staff, and even high schools themselves. Individual high school’s student populations are fluctuating up and down, but the overall district population is decreasing. The development of independent online learning, the California wildfires, and cost of living are pushing families out of the area, and students out of the district.

Santa Rosa High School is one of the schools rapidly decreasing in population. It is the oldest secondary school in the district, founded in 1874, and has been losing more students in the last four years than ever before. Santa Rosa High’s current Registrar, Amanda Stephens, explained: “Four years ago, there [were] about 2200 students. Now, we’re down to about 1560.” This dramatic decrease can be connected to the development of online learning that took place four years ago during lockdown. 

In 2020, during the COVID lockdown period, all students were forced to experiment with online learning from home in order to keep up with their education. When students had the opportunity to come back, many opted out and even now some continue to learn online. Programs like Apex Learning Virtual School offer online courses for students to complete, rather than being taught in a public school, private school, or homeschooled by their parents. Increasing numbers of students are still choosing to get their education that way now. 

“I do think that the majority of our students are going to online school, where they can be at home, but we are trying to get students [back] because of the A-G requirements… A lot of our students start to fail or they drop out,” said Stephens. Therefore, the district is not only losing students in their schools, but their total numbers of passing and graduating students, as well. 

The California School Dashboard displays that in the 2022-2023 school year, every high school in the district had a lower graduation rate than the year before. Most high schools decreased by 2.5-3.9%, except Montgomery, which rose by 1.8%, meaning that our graduation rates are dropping more than they are increasing. 

Santa Rosa High has also faced a lot of funding challenges due to their lowering enrollment. Stephens commented: “With our decrease in population, our funding has gone down. We’ve lost a counselor, we’ve lost teachers, and the district has taken away classes, so our classes are bigger.”

Despite a lot of dwindling numbers, Piner High School’s population has increased and that has been very positive for them. The main reason for this upturn is their developing specialized programs. 

Andrea Correia, the Principal at Piner High School, commented on their rising population: “I think it’s impacted us favorably. I’m really excited. We have some really great programs here… The Early College Magnet Program… Health Science and Biotech Program… [and] Culinary Program. We have a beautiful professional kitchen… We also have our Sparks Center which is a planetarium.” 

Despite this current success because of their developed programs, they may be fighting the same struggles as Santa Rosa High in a few years with dropping district enrollment. Correia explained: “They project us to be a little over 1000 students in 10 years,” while they are currently sitting at 1384. With this decrease, Piner will be struggling a lot more. So will all the high schools with the drop in the district. 

In all of this, Carrillo has been pretty constant in terms of its population. Principal Amy Wiese said, “I wouldn’t say that we’ve actually been increasing. We’re at 1586 students. I started seven years ago and I want to say our year ended at like 1550… Every year, we’ve ended up somewhere between 1550 and 1600, for the past seven years.”

Despite Carrillo’s smaller fluctuations in student population, the school is still facing issues. “We have a great Parent Association, but we don’t have a lot of funds at all… We don’t raise a whole lot of money,” Wiese said. “It’s definitely not money that keeps our school going. It’s more the academic record.”

Carrillo did experience a decrease in student population after the 2017 fires. Wiese explains: “We did get down to 1450, post-fire… A lot of our families moved out of the state.” With so many people displaced by the fires, and moving away, the district lost huge numbers of students. 

In addition to this, a lot of young families can’t afford to live in Sonoma County because it’s so expensive. “We’re all seeing people moving out of California because of the cost of living. You wanna be able to have some level of security,” said Correia, and families can’t have security if they can’t make enough money to live here. In combination with independent online learning, the rising lack of families in the county is what is drastically decreasing the number of students in the district. 

This leaves just specialized aspects of individual schools keeping students at the high schools. Santa Rosa High has the ArtQuest Program, Piner has their STEM programs, and Maria Carrillo has incredible academics. Every place has something else to offer, and as interests develop and change, families choose the school that matches their students best. 

The populations at the school sites may be slightly protected by their programs, but enrollment in the district is still dropping as a whole. This will impact students dramatically in the future. Correia guesses: “I think that we’re gonna have to maybe consolidate some schools,” which the district has already been discussing. “Unfortunately when you have a declining enrollment in a community, at some point you have to look at your infrastructure [and ask] can we continue to afford to facilitate these spaces?” This is the same question that led Analy and El Molino high schools to be merged back in 2021. The area has seen this kind of change before, and it is likely that SRCS will have a similar experience very soon. 

Secondary schools across the district are seeing a lot of changes as a result of the district’s population and no matter what, there will always be challenges and achievements. The question is: will our high schools continue to succeed more than they fail?

“I think that if there’s one thing that SRCS teachers do really well is make it work,” Correia reassures. “It doesn’t matter how many kids you have in your classroom, you're gonna do the best you can do.”