Surge in District Enrollment Expected

The Los Angeles Unified School District will face another enrollment crunch over the next decade as a bulge of elementary school students moves to secondary campuses in the district’s most crowded areas, according to a report released Monday.

The growth in middle schools and high schools will occur throughout the district but will be concentrated in the eastern San Fernando Valley, the Pico-Union area, downtown and in the southeast “hub cities,” including South Gate and Huntington Park, administrators said.

The report confirmed earlier predictions. The district has been growing at a record pace and will probably peak in the 2005-06 school year with 43,000 more students than 1996-97’s enrollment of 667,624, said Rena Perez, a district demographer who helped prepare the report.

“We’re growing by leaps and bounds,” said school board member Victoria Castro. “We’ve been talking about this for years.”

High school campuses, which served just under 160,000 students in grades 9 through 12 last year, are expected to gain the most students, reaching nearly 200,000 within seven years, the report says.

An influx of children of immigrants and the grandchildren of baby boomers accounts for much of the increase, district officials said. The district grew to a record 681,505 students this year, with the majority of the 13,881 new students in elementary school.

With the influx of so many students, the school district will need to build at least two middle schools and eight high schools, officials said.

School district staffers will return later this month with a detailed plan for building schools to accommodate the swelling enrollments.

Monday’s report envisions all middle schools and high schools operating on year-round schedules. It also assumes that the more than 11,000 students now bused from crowded campuses will be returned to their neighborhood schools.

School board members will have to make politically sensitive decisions in the months ahead--deciding where to build more schools and whether to return the bused students to their home schools or take campuses off year-round schedules, or some combination.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Enrollment Boom Ahead

An enrollment boom is expected in Los Angeles schools over the next decade, as the grandchildren of baby boomers move through the system.

Source: Los Angeles Unified School District