WATSONVILLE >> Over the past few decades, California public schools have faced declining enrollment across the board. This includes at Pajaro Valley Unified School District, which held a special school board study session Thursday to discuss the issue.

The presentation was delivered by Danyel Conolley and Linette Hodson, the respective associate vice president and director of Management Consulting Services, the consulting arm of School Services of California. Conolley said she has many years of experience in working with human resources and labor relations in school districts, and Hudson has decades of experience working in public education, including more than 10 years as assistant superintendent of special education.

Conolley said California overall has experienced a decline in public school enrollment over the past 20 years.

“Our state population is on a downward trend, and as a result, our public schools have experienced less students,” she said.

Historically, Conolley said the formula to respond to fewer students has been “less students, less money, less staff.” However, she said the COVID-19 pandemic “took that formula and put it on its head.”

“We had significant drops in student enrollment and attendance throughout the state, but we had access to more money than we ever had historically with access to emergency funding resources,” she said. “We are also coming off a hiring frenzy where, as a state, public schools have hired more staff than we ever have.”

This, Conolley said, has resulted in a misalignment between student enrollment and staffing needs. Other factors she highlighted were the population of California getting older and families having children later, resulting in gaps between when they enter schools.Pajaro Valley meanwhile has experienced a 15% loss, or 3,000 fewer students, since the 2013-14 academic year. However, since the 2019-20 year, the district has experienced an upswing in staffing with 85 full-time equivalent positions added, mostly for classified staff. Conolley said this was consistent with the state.

Hodson went over the district’s average daily attendance, which is tied into its primary source of funding, the Local Control Funding Formula. From the first day of the school year to the last, attendance is counted with the total days of student attendance divided by the days of instruction. Lower attendance rates result in less revenue from the state.

From 2017 to 2020, Hodson said Pajaro Valley Unified had an average attendance of 94%. Data was not available for the 2020-21 academic year — the COVID shutdown year — but average attendance had dipped to 87% in the 2021-22 school year and risen slightly to 88.5% in the 2022-23 year.

“This is where I say you don’t necessarily have control, but schools have influence about the ADA and about attendance, and if you have actions at school sites to encourage attendance, this is how you have some influence,” she said.

Creating programs that would get kids excited about coming to school, Hodson said, would be very beneficial for student attendance and that the school board could determine which programs to allocate the money toward.

Among the recommendations of the presentation were to consider where to establish a staffing reserve in the budget, using the staffing reserve to add positions as needed once school starts and actual student enrollment is known and doing a budget revision to release the rest to the unassigned reserve or to other priority areas of the budget, identifying the services needed to support district initiatives and achieve goals, considering the impacts of reduction in the event of layoffs and service reductions, applying caution during summer layoff windows, issuing intent to return surveys to help the Human Resources Department forecast staffing needs and adjust layoff notices and closely monitoring retirements and resignations to minimize the number of notices issued.

Hodson also said that long-term declining enrollment may lead to school closures, which she said was never a popular decision but could be necessary. In any case, she said districts should consider factors such as enrollment trends, maximum potential savings, school sizes, proximity to other locations and building conditions before going down that path.

Conolley also said the school board was a crucial part of making decisions regarding reductions.

“There’s a lot of budgetary information that was shared here tonight regarding the state budget,” she said. “That’s beyond our control, but what is within your control is the decisions that you make that do impact your district budget.”

In a public comment, Renaissance High School social studies teacher Chris Webb said the district should focus on how to attract students.

“We do that by enhancing our programming, valuing the relationships — including the relationships students have with teachers,” he said. “I think the other thing we can do is be responsive as a district and make people know that when they come here, the powers that be will serve them.”

Board Vice President Oscar Soto said he had pulled his kids out of the district and enrolled them in private school because he did not feel the district met all their needs.

“We do have some incredible people here that do some incredible things, especially with the number of students that we have,” he said. “We’re doing some incredible stuff, but we’re capable of so much more.”

Trustee Olivia Flores said declining enrollment was a necessary discussion to have and especially for the community to be informed.

“There’s birth rates: not much we can do about that,” she said. “There’s people moving out of California: not much we can do about that. People leaving our district: that’s something we can do. Those are numbers we can get back, and as a district, that’s where we can focus.”