California is seeing a troubling wave of school closures.

For more than 19,000 students across the state, the return to class looks dramatically different this year, as campuses shut their doors following a prolonged enrollment slide that continues to strain California school districts.

Public school enrollment in California dropped 1.3% in the 2025-26 school year, leaving classrooms with nearly 75,000 fewer students. According to EdSource, it marked the sharpest year-over-year decline since the 2021-22 academic year.

The financial impact is immediate. Because California school funding is largely connected to student attendance, shrinking enrollment means shrinking revenue — even as districts continue to face fixed costs such as staffing, facilities and daily operations.

This is not a short-term dip.

California school enrollment began trending downward around 2016, then fell more sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic. For several years, however, campus closures did not follow the same pattern, actually decreasing between 2016 and 2023.

That has changed quickly.

In 2025, 79 schools closed across California, and by July of this year, another 73 campuses had already shut down.

“It’s been on the downward trend since I started. It’s never been drastic from one year to the next, but when you add up the numbers … that adds up over time,” Los Angeles social studies teacher William Chavez told SFGATE.

Michael Kirst, a Stanford professor emeritus and former president of the California State Board of Education, said the problem is hardly confined to one corner of the state.

“This is happening everywhere,” Kirst told the outlet. “There are very few districts that aren’t experiencing it.”

The culprit is a nasty cocktail of factors: families moving out of California or to less-expensive parts of the state, immigration enforcement and a dramatic decline in the number of babies being born.

California’s fertility rate fell from 2.21 children per woman in 2007 to just 1.48 in 2023, according to the Public Policy Institute of America, well below the 2.1 replacement level needed to maintain a stable population.

The “baby bust” is partly the result of a spectacular collapse in teen births, which have plunged 86% since 1991. Birth rates have also fallen among women in their 20s, while a rise among women 35 and older hasn’t been enough to offset the decline.

The trend isn’t unique to California. Birth rates have dropped in every state since 2008, although California’s decline has been slightly steeper than the national average.

UC Irvine sociology professor Paul Hanselman told the Orange County Register that the roots of the trend stretch back to the Great Recession.

“The big pattern is the Great Recession,” Hanselman said, noting that birth rates peaked around 2008 and have declined since.

“There’s a lot of explanations, but economic explanations in terms of challenges of having kids is a big part of the story, and it doesn’t feel like we’ve gone back,” he said.

Meanwhile, California’s famously exorbitant housing costs are making it increasingly difficult for families to stick around.

“California has an added problem of the cost of housing, which is especially high in urban areas,” Kirst told SFGATE. “Families with children can’t afford to live there.”

Los Angeles Unified has especially felt the pain. The district closed 14 schools after enrollment dropped by about 16,765 students in a single year, according to EdSource.

San Jose Unified closed five schools after losing 22.5% of its enrollment since 2015-16, while Oakland Unified also closed five after enrollment fell 8.7%.

The schools being shuttered also tend to serve some of the state’s most vulnerable students. This year, test scores at closed schools were roughly 14% below the statewide average in both English and math, while 73% of students came from low-income households, compared with 62.5% statewide.

Still, fewer students could offer districts an opportunity, if they use it wisely.

California averaged about 21 students per classroom in 2025, compared with 15 nationally. Rather than automatically chopping teachers and programs, districts could potentially use smaller student populations to reduce overcrowding and give teachers more one-on-one time with kids.

Ironically, California’s public schools have record levels of overall state funding available, with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s final budget providing about $128 billion from the state’s general fund.

But as the state’s classrooms continue to empty, districts are discovering that even a record-sized pot of money can’t make the demographic math disappear.