{"id":508814,"date":"2026-10-26T22:14:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-26T22:14:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/508814\/"},"modified":"2026-10-26T22:14:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-26T22:14:10","slug":"sac-city-unified-keeps-losing-students-heres-how-the-empty-seats-are-making-its-bleak-budget-worse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/508814\/","title":{"rendered":"Sac City Unified keeps losing students. Here\u2019s how the empty seats are making its bleak budget worse"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Sacramento City Unified School District is mired in a deep financial crisis, one that\u2019s already led to layoffs, cuts to school programs and could lead to a loss of local decision-making. This story is part of a series<\/a> where CapRadio journalists examined what\u2019s at stake for students, families and district employees that we\u2019ll roll out every Tuesday this month in the SacramenKnow newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Sacramento City Unified School District has room for about 54,000 students, but only teaches roughly 37,000.<\/p>\n

Twenty-two of the district\u2019s 72 schools are less than half full. Enrollment has fallen almost every year for two decades, and the district\u2019s own forecasts show it falling further no matter which way the numbers break. \u201cThe models differ on pace,\u201d Chris Ralston, the district\u2019s assistant superintendent of facilities, told the board this spring<\/a>, showing low, middle and high projections that all pointed down. \u201cThey do not differ on direction.\u201d<\/p>\n

The slow drain of students out of Sac City Unified has made the district\u2019s already bleak budget picture worse. California pays districts largely by the student, so as Sac City\u2019s enrollment falls, so does its share of state money. This summer, county education officials said the school district\u2019s budget shortfall had grown to $227 million.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In response to the deficit, Sac City\u2019s board has cut staff and school programs<\/a>, though trustees said they\u2019ve tried to keep cuts away from the classroom. The district\u2019s financial crisis is deep enough that the district now faces the threat of state receivership<\/a>, in which a county-appointed administrator would take over decisions the board and superintendent make now.<\/p>\n

Perhaps most pressing for students and families in the district, the enrollment losses are pushing Sac City toward a decision it has spent a year trying to avoid: which schools to close.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Schools often serve as a source of neighborhood pride and a civic hub. Shutting them down, as the district did just over a decade ago, can cause community trauma and disproportionate impacts, especially when closures take place in already underserved neighborhoods. One district plan under consideration calls for closing as many as 20 campuses.<\/p>\n

Given the scale of Sac City\u2019s enrollment declines, it\u2019s easy to miss one half-empty classroom at a time. \u201cWhen people hear underutilization, they may imagine a few isolated sites,\u201d Ralston told the board during a review of the district\u2019s buildings. \u201cWhat this actually shows is a systemwide pattern.\u201d Enrollment peaked around 55,000 in 2001 and has dropped by about 20,000 since, roughly a third. Elementary schools have been hit hardest, down about 30% in a decade. Across the district, Sac City is filling a little over 68% of the seats it has.<\/p>\n

As part of our series examining Sac City\u2019s fiscal crisis<\/a>, CapRadio sought to answer why enrollment has declined and how the steep drop has impacted the district.<\/p>\n

Where did the students go?<\/p>\n

\u201cThe birth trend is really what\u2019s driving the statewide declines in enrollment,\u201d said Alex Alvarado, a research analyst in the California Department of Finance\u2019s demographic research unit, at a state summit on declining enrollment in October. Alvarado has produced the state\u2019s K-12 projections since 2013, and said the trend runs well beyond California, \u201cacross the United States and in the world.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

California\u2019s public schools have lost nearly half a million students over the past decade, down to about 5.7 million, and the department of finance expects them to lose about 700,000 more over the next 10 years. Declining births are the main reason: more than 500,000 a year a decade ago, under 400,000 now, with projections closer to 370,000. Tony Thurmond,\u00a0California’s state superintendent, called it \u201cthe issue of our time.\u201d<\/p>\n

A common explanation for declining enrollment, that families are fleeing to private and home schooling, doesn\u2019t hold up, said Julien Lafortune, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California<\/a>. Private and home schooling jumped early in the pandemic, he told the summit, but much of that has faded. The smallest private schools, the ones that look like home schools, sit only modestly above where they were before 2020, and larger private schools have fallen back to their pre-pandemic size. Over the long run, Lafortune said, the losses are explained by births and by families moving out of California, not by students leaving the public system.<\/p>\n

Sac City\u2019s decline, though, is worse than the state\u2019s, and it stands out for a specific reason. Over the past decade, Sacramento County was one of only 17 California counties where public school enrollment grew. The county added students. The district lost them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Part of the gap is housing. \u201cThere\u2019s not very many new homes that are being built in our area that would bring in new kids, probably with the exception of Delta Shores,\u201d said Taylor Kayatta, a Sac City board member since 2022. The district is landlocked, and its neighborhoods were built out decades ago, filled with families whose children have grown. Ralston told the board that local births have fallen and that immigration, long a source of new families, has \u201ccome to a stop.\u201d The district still enrolls about the same share of the school-age children who live inside its boundaries, he said. But there are fewer of those children than there used to be.<\/p>\n

While competition from other schools is not the entire reason for the district’s predicament, it is part of it. Sac City is an open-enrollment district, meaning families can apply to send their children to almost any school in the district, not only the one they\u2019re zoned for. Many use it to steer their kids toward the larger or higher-rated campuses, and some families leave the district entirely, for charters or the suburbs. Board member Jasjit Singh, who represents the area around Hiram Johnson High, told colleagues that families often write a school off before they ever walk in. Part of that is academic: Hiram Johnson offers only a few Advanced Placement classes, Singh said, so a family whose child wants a heavier course load looks elsewhere. Part of it is reputation. \u201cFolks were like, \u2018That\u2019s not a school I\u2019m going to. I\u2019m not sending my kids there,\u2019\u201d he said of his door-knocking campaign to speak to parents.<\/p>\n

Kayatta has also pointed to charter schools, which have pulled students from the district for years. That sets a trap for the district. Shutting a half-empty neighborhood school saves money, but an empty campus is an opening for a charter or private school to move in and compete for the students who remain, which is part of why past closures have sometimes deepened the district\u2019s losses rather than easing them. Ralston\u2019s answer, laid out in his facilities review, is blunt: tear the empty schools down. \u201cOnce it is fully vacated, the buildings would be removed. I will bulldoze them down,\u201d he told the board. Leaving them standing, he said, just invites a competitor to set up shop and pull away the students the district has left.<\/p>\n

Empty schools cost money<\/p>\n

California is one of only six states that pay districts mainly for the students who show up each day rather than the ones enrolled. \u201cWhen a student\u2019s there, funding is provided for every day,\u201d Thurmond said, making the case for switching to enrollment-based funding. \u201cWhen a student\u2019s not there, we lose funding.\u201d A shrinking district tends to get hit twice, because enrollment decline usually comes with weaker daily attendance. The district loses money when a student leaves, and loses more when the students who stay miss school.<\/p>\n

Costs, meanwhile, don\u2019t fall as fast as enrollment does. \u201cYou can\u2019t just keep the level of programs and staff if you don\u2019t have the students to support it,\u201d Kayatta said. A half-empty school still has a principal, an office and a building to heat, and with fewer students to carry those bills, each expense weighs more. That is what the 68% utilization figure really measures: money spent on space instead of students.<\/p>\n

\"SacMichael Fine stands at a podium and gives a presentation to the Sacramento City Unified School District on May 7th, 2026.Ruth Finch\/CapRadio<\/p>\n

Statewide, a smaller student population isn\u2019t necessarily a funding problem. California guarantees its public schools a set share of the state budget, an amount tied to the economy, not how many kids are enrolled. Spread that guaranteed money across fewer students, and the amount per student can even go up. The catch for Sac City is that each district is paid for the students it actually has. So the statewide gain only reaches a district that still has the students to collect it. Sac City keeps losing them, so its share keeps shrinking, while its half-empty buildings cost about the same to run.<\/p>\n

Winning students back<\/p>\n

Reversing the overall decline is mostly out of reach. The children aren\u2019t being born, and even the state\u2019s most optimistic projections never climb back to where enrollment was. \u201cWe know that we can\u2019t just wait out declining enrollment,\u201d Thurmond told the summit. \u201cWe need a long-term strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Districts are left fighting for a bigger share of a shrinking pool. San Diego Unified, which loses less than 1% of its enrollment a year, opened 52 neighborhood enrollment centers, ran a summer sign-up campaign that brought in about 3,000 students, and is building housing for its own employees and looking at offering free childcare. Vista Unified, in San Diego County, instead shrank on purpose, cutting from 31 schools to 27 as enrollment fell from about 28,000 to 17,300, but it turned closed campuses into community resource centers and says a larger share of local families now choose the district.<\/p>\n

Sac City\u2019s efforts are smaller, and aimed more at the money existing students bring in. Ralston told the board the district has found one encouraging trend. \u201cWe have been doing a better job retaining students year-over-year,\u201d he said, meaning fewer kids leave midway through. The district also points families toward new and modernized campuses. But its most visible move this fall is about revenue, not enrollment.<\/p>\n

At its October board meeting<\/a>, Brian Heap, the district\u2019s executive director of community engagement and communications, asked the public for a small favor: send your kids to school one more day. \u201cRight or wrong, public schools are funded based on their average daily attendance,\u201d Heap said. One extra day of attendance from every student, his team figured, is worth about $2.5 million. So the district is making a contest of it, called \u201cOne More Day,\u201d with schools competing each month for a food-truck visit, a \u201cmystery munchie\u201d celebration, and an end-of-year drawing for a $250,000 campus-improvement grant. The targets: cut chronic absenteeism to 25% from 28.4% in the 2026-2027 school year, and lift daily attendance to just under 93% from 91.3%.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t sit well with everyone on the board. \u201cI think we should move away from putting numbers on top of kids\u2019 heads and saying we would get $70 to $75 if you come to school another day,\u201d said student board member Owen Naqica, \u201cbecause it kind of dehumanizes a lot of it.\u201d The message, he worried, becomes \u201ccome to school so we can get money\u201d instead of \u201ccome to school because we value and care about your education.\u201d<\/p>\n

The campaign also runs into the same budget crisis it\u2019s meant to ease. Asked how the district actually reaches absent students, Heap\u2019s colleague Miranda Bredeson described a \u201c3-5-7\u201d system: a phone call home after three absences, a call from a principal after five, a family meeting after seven. The most effective step, she said, is a home visit, a parent-teacher model Sac City helped pioneer and other districts copied. But the team that does it has been cut from nine people to three. The staff who used to knock on doors \u201caren\u2019t quite as available now,\u201d she said, so the district leans on social workers and principals instead.<\/p>\n

The budget impact<\/p>\n

Sac City has spent the past year under county oversight after it could no longer certify a balanced budget, and the state\u2019s finance watchdog has warned it could run out of cash in 2027. Avoiding state receivership now colors nearly every decision the district makes.<\/p>\n

At the October meeting, Ralston and Chief Business Officer Gerardo Castillo walked the board through the running numbers. The district has found just under $50 million in savings and would need about $17 million more every month to balance by spring. The cuts already reach into the everyday: district cell phones shut off, $3.8 million in after-school money moved to cover custodial costs, elementary sports stipends cut, and principals asked to give back 10% of their discretionary budgets. The board has been advised that if the gap isn\u2019t closed, the district could lose control of its finances to a county-appointed administrator should the district elect to go into receivership, something board members have said is not an option.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The biggest lever is the one the district most wants to leave alone: closing schools. Ralston\u2019s spring review mapped out consolidation scenarios, and the Sac City Teachers Association union said the plan could eventually close as many as 20 campuses. \u201cThe district remains in crisis,\u201d union president Nikki Davis Milevsky told the board.<\/p>\n

What makes that decision so difficult isn\u2019t just which schools are emptiest. It\u2019s which neighborhoods they\u2019re in. When the district last closed schools, in 2012-13, the campuses that shut were concentrated in its lowest-income, heavily Black and brown neighborhoods, and board members have made clear they don\u2019t want a repeat. Trustee April Ybarra lived it as a parent, watching what shutting Fruit Ridge Elementary did to the surrounding community, and she pointed to the wealthier side of her own neighborhood as a warning. \u201cYou will see a difference day and night,\u201d she said. That history, as much as the dollars, is why the board keeps putting the closure question off.<\/p>\n

The roughly $600 million facilities bond Ralston floated in the spring did not make the November ballot.<\/p>\n

The only school measure in front of voters is Measure M, a $95 parcel tax for special education that needs a two-thirds supermajority on Nov. 3.<\/p>\n

One more day<\/p>\n

The students Heap\u2019s campaign is counting on are the ones still enrolled, in a district with room for 17,000 more. The ones it lost didn\u2019t leave the region. Sacramento County grew around the district as the district emptied. They moved to the suburbs, or to charters, or were never born into the city at all.<\/p>\n

More attendance brings in money. It doesn\u2019t bring students back, and Sac City, like most shrinking districts, is no longer counting on winning its enrollment back. What\u2019s left to decide is which schools to keep and which to close. Ybarra, who lived through the last round, said the community already knows where things are going. \u201cWe\u2019re not ignorant,\u201d she said. \u201cWe understand deeply what\u2019s happening.\u201d<\/p>\n

Additional reporting by Keyshawn Davis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Sacramento City Unified School District is mired in a deep financial crisis, one that\u2019s already led to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":508815,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[701,702,196331,121,123,122],"class_list":["post-508814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sacramento","tag-capital-public-radio","tag-cpr","tag-sac-city-unified-keeps-losing-students-heres-how-the-empty-seats-are-making-its-bleak-budget-worse","tag-sacramento","tag-sacramento-headlines","tag-sacramento-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=508814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/508815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=508814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=508814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=508814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}