SFUSD Enrollment Demand (2024)

SFUSD recently released the results of the Main Round of its enrollment cycle for 2023-24. I thought it would be interesting to dig into them to see if there are are lessons to be learned.

The Enrollment Process

Of the kids in first grade in San Francisco, roughly two-thirds are in SFUSD; a little over 4% are in charter schools; and 29% are in private schools1. Many, but not all, of the kids who ultimately enroll in charter or private schools also submit SFUSD enrollment applications. We can think of the kids (or more precisely, their families) as being one of the following types:

• Only Private: never even applies to SFUSD, either because the child is guaranteed a space in a charter or private school due to sibling preference or because the family simply won’t consider SFUSD;

• Private Preferred: applies to SFUSD as a backup in case the student doesn’t get in to any of the preferred private or charter schools.

• SFUSD Preferred: first choice is a SFUSD school but private schools are also high choices. Whether the child ultimately attends SFUSD or not depends on which SFUSD school and which private or charter schools the child is admitted to.

• SFUSD Only: doesn’t apply to any private or charter school

Now, here’s a stylized description of what happens during enrollment

• In the Main Round, families applying to kindergarten have over 100 options (counting general education and language programs) to choose from. They list up to 8 or 10 choices. Simultaneously, many are also applying to charter and/or private schools. 6th and 9th grade applicants have far fewer choices to navigate.

• SFUSD assigns students to schools based on parent preferences and the district’s board-approved tiebreaker procedures. The charter and private schools make their decisions independently and send out their offers at around the same time.

• The Private Preferred and SFUSD Preferred families now make their choices depending on the offers they’ve received. Some will accept their SFUSD offers; some will turn them down because they prefer their private/charter choice to the assignment they received from SFUSD. This frees up hundreds of spots in SFUSD schools, some of them in the most sought-after SFUSD schools.

• In the second round, those freed up spots are allocated to families who are unhappy with their first round assignments and to those who missed the deadline altogether for the main round. SFUSD-preferred families who didn’t receive an acceptable SFUSD assignment in the Main Round might not participate in the second and subsequent rounds because they have already accepted, and paid a deposit for, a private school place.

The Main Round for 2022-23 was held in March 2022 but the enrollment figures for each school were only published by CDE in early April 2023. The enrollment figures are not broken down by program so we can’t, for example, see how many enrolled in the General Education program at Starr King and how many in the Mandarin Immersion program. By combining the Main Round application figures and the subsequent enrollment figures, we can calculate a yield for the district and for individual schools. The yield is the enrollment in the entry year (K, 6th, 9th) divided by the number of students assigned (admitted). The yield for the district will be less than 100% because of all the Private-Preferred and SFUSD-Preferred families that submit applications but don’t enroll. The yield for a popular school can be 100% because even if some admitted students don’t enroll, their place will be taken by others in the second or subsequent rounds. Less popular schools can have much lower yields because many of the students initially assigned to them don’t want to go there and switch to other schools as soon as space opens up. For example, a student assigned to Academy in the Main Round might have switched to Balboa in the second round to take a spot that was freed up when a student from Balboa switched to Lowell to take a spot that was freed up when a Lowell admit took a place in a private school.

High School Admissions

Much of the focus at the high school level is on the selective admissions policies of Lowell and, to a lesser extent, Asawa SOTA. Lowell is indeed the school that attracts the most first preferences but the popularity of Lincoln is striking. It gets more first preferences than Washington and Galileo combined even though it is about the same size as each of them. Indeed, Lowell and Lincoln between them are the first choices of 55% of all General Education applicants even though they account for only about 31% of seats.

In 2022-23, 4659 9th grade assignments were made in the Main Round and the number of students who enrolled ended up being 3580 for a yield of 77%. There is enormous difference from school to school. In 2022-23 Lowell, SOTA, Washington, Lincoln, and Galileo all enrolled 84% or more of the students assigned to them with Balboa and Mission not far behind at 79%. Burton and Wallenberg were in the 61-63% range with the others around 50% or lower. Jordan and Academy@McAteer brought up the tail: 153 students were initially assigned to Jordan but 9th grade enrollment ended up being only 47 (30%). Meanwhile, 182 students were assigned to Academy but only 72 (40%) enrolled.

For next year, 2023-24, SFUSD has assigned 112 fewer students for 9th grade, a drop of 2.4%. How that will translate into enrollment next year remains to be seen.

Despite this decline, the district increased the number of students assigned to Lowell by nearly one-third, from 674 to 893. That would be by far the highest class size in Lowell’s history and went uncommented on by the district so we have to guess at their motivation. It’s possible that they are expanding the class size. It’s also possible that they know some of those 893 will turn down their assignments in favor of charter or public schools but they hope by increasing the number of Main Round assignments, they will give some SFUSD-preferred families a reason to stay in the district. What is certain is that there will be far fewer Lowell slots available in the second round this year.

Wallenberg and O’Connell also had more students assigned to them than in 2022-23. The increase was 28 (284 instead of 256) for O’Connell and 25 (230 instead of 205) for Wallenberg. No reason was given for why the district decided to increase assignments to these schools.

Since there were fewer applicants overall, and more were assigned to Lowell (and Wallenberg and O’Connell) than ever before, most of the other schools had significantly fewer students assigned to them. Galileo, Lincoln, and Washington all admitted between 30 and 35 fewer students than last year. We’ll have to see what effect that has on enrollment. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll enroll fewer students because there’ll be less opportunity for the students who are assigned there to move up to Lowell in the second round.

Balboa is an interesting case. In 2022-23, 357 listed it as their first choice, 384 were assigned there and the 9th grade enrollment ended up being 304. For 2023-24, the number listing Balboa as their first choice went up by nearly 10% to 389 but the number assigned there went down by more than 10% to 336. Again, the district provided no color on this decision.

Jordan and Academy@McAteer, the two schools with the lowest yields last year, both had far fewer students assigned to them this year. Academy was down by nearly half, from 182 to 95. Jordan was down from 155 to 93. This doesn’t mean enrollment at those schools will be much lower. A far greater proportion of the students assigned to these schools will have listed them as a 1st or other high choice so enrollment may not fall by that much.

Middle Schools

The middle school situation is tricky to analyze because many students who attend K-8 schools don’t submit applications. I believe they are automatically assigned to 6th grade in their current school unless they submit an application to change. The number of students who submit applications is thus far fewer than the number who receive assignments and that in turn is far higher than the number who actually enroll. In 2022-23, 3525 students submitted applications, just over 4000 students were assigned to a 6th grade spot and just over 3400 enrolled in 6th grade for a district-wide yield of 85%.

Most of the middle schools enrolled 90% or more of those who were assigned to them. In fact, the only ones with below average yields were the three schools in the south-east: Willie Brown (which enrolled only 43% of the students who were assigned to it), King (46%), and Visitacion Valley (50%). Weirdly, more students listed those schools as their 1st choices than ended up enrolling in them. 126 made Brown their 1st choice but only 115 enrolled; 144 made King their 1st choices but only 128 enrolled; 112 made Visitacion Valley their first choice but only 110 enrolled. The most plausible explanation is that they chose to attend charter or private schools instead.

For 2023-24, the number of students submitting applications dropped by nearly 9% (3525 to 3214). The number receiving assignments dropped by 5% (4010 to 3803). I’m not sure which is the better predictor for future enrollment but neither augurs well. The schools to see the biggest drop in assignments were Brown (-80), King (-44), and Visitacion Valley (-49).

Everett, whose problems in 2022 were the subject of news coverage, saw its first preferences drop from 170 to 70 but the number of students who were assigned there actually rose from 155 to 167. Lick, in Noe Valley, is the nearest middle school to Everett and is also majority Latino. Its first preferences rose by 23% (127 to 156) but the number assigned there was down slightly (214 to 209).

Marina, which had its own problems recently, saw its first preferences drop by 26% (from 183 to 136), but the number assigned there was unchanged (242). Hoover also saw a big drop in 1st preferences (21%, from 391 to 307) but had practically the same number of students assigned (343).

A.P. Giannini, in the Sunset, is the most popular middle school. In 2022-23, 568 students made it their first choice, 418 of them were admitted, and 396 (95%) enrolled. In 2023-24, first preferences rose by 11% to 628 but the number assigned was practically unchanged (414).

Kindergarten

Major changes to elementary schools are being driven by the combination of budgetary pressures and the need to expand transitional kindergarten.

Kindergarten

Applications Slightly Down

The number of kindergarten applicants was down 1% from 2022-23 (from 3991 to 3955). That’s much better than the larger declines recorded at the 6th and 9th grade transition points but it still means that kindergarten applicants are down 13% since the last pre-pandemic Main Round in 2020-21.

Main Round Participation Rate Varies By Race/Ethnicity

We have seen that, at the middle and high school levels, the number of kids assigned to schools is higher than the number who ultimately enroll. SFUSD assigns about 900 more 9th graders and 700 more 6th graders than ultimately enroll. It’s natural to expect this to be true at the kindergarten level too but it isn’t. Over the last ten years, the aggregate number of kindergarten admits and the aggregate number of kindergarten enrollees are close to equal. We know that there are lots of kids who apply to SFUSD but ultimately attend private or charter schools. There must be just as many kids who don’t apply in the Main Round but do end up enrolling.

How big is this number? We don’t know. SFUSD doesn’t publish the number of kids who receive an offer but don’t enroll or any statistics about Round 2 of the enrollment cycle.

Figure 1 compares the race/ethnicity of Main Round applicants with the race/ethnicity of those who later enroll. (The data is from 2019-20 because that’s the last year for which SFUSD published the breakdown for kindergarten applicants. Now the district just shows the ethnicity of applicants to all grades, which is useless for most purposes.) Here’s a few things to note:

1. There were more White applicants than Asian or Latino applicants. That was very surprising to me.

2. The number of White students who ultimately enrolled (977) is substantially lower than the number who applied in the Main Round (1188). This is as expected: some Private Preferred and SFUSD Preferred families are going to end up outside SFUSD.

3. For every other group except the Two or More, the number who ultimately enroll is actually greater than the number who applied in the Main Round. Even though there are plenty of Asian and Latino and Black students in charter and private schools, many of whom would have also applied to SFUSD, they are far outnumbered by those who didn’t submit an application at all in the Main Round.

It’s unclear why the Main Round participation rate varies so much by race/ethnicity. Presumably, parental language fluency is part of the explanation. If you come from a foreign country and don’t speak English and are unfamiliar with San Francisco’s unusual educational policies, you might not know that you’re expected to apply so far in advance.

The district publishes statistics showing the chances of getting admitted to a school of your choice. Back in 2019-20 (again, the last year for which we have this data), 61% of White, 71% of Chinese (sic), 75% of Hispanic, and 88% of Black kindergarten applicants were admitted to one of their top three choices in the Main Round. Those who missed the Main Round and applied later are going to be less successful. This probably brings the overall success rate of the different groups more in line with each other.

Kindergarten Yield per School

Taylor (Portola) and Buena Vista/Horace Mann (Mission) managed the neat trick of enrolling significantly more students than they were initially assigned. Taylor was assigned 80 but enrolled 104 while BVHM was assigned 53 but enrolled 67. Here, by contrast, are the schools with the lowest yields in percentage terms.

• Malcolm X: enrolled 20 out of 44

• Carver: enrolled 14 out of 23

• Cobb: enrolled 44 out of 71

• Visitacion Valley: enrolled 33 out of 52

• Argonne: enrolled 59 out of 89

• SF Community: enrolled 22 out 33

• El Dorado: enrolled 34 out of 49

• Rooftop: enrolled 48 out of 67

• Sheridan: enrolled 50 out of 69

• Redding: enrolled 51 out of 70

Ways to Increase Enrollment

SFUSD caps elementary classroom sizes at 22 and it only assigns 22 per classroom even though it knows that some of those who are assigned to a school will turn down the assignment and attend a private or charter school instead. One way to increase enrollment would be to mimic what all private schools and universities do — it could make more assignments to its popular schools than it has spaces available. This should increase overall SFUSD enrollment because more SFUSD-preferred families would now receive an assignment good enough to get them to enroll. Meanwhile, more SFUSD-Only families would also receive preferred assignments and thereby avoid the disappointment of the Main Round and the stress of entering the second round. SFUSD did this at Lowell this year. It assigned 885 students to Lowell even though the actual 9th grade enrollment capacity of the school is closer to 700. It also seems to have done it with Transitional Kindergarten where it routinely assigned 25 or 26 kids per classroom.

Language Classes

Another way to increase enrollment would be to offer more of what people want, and what people want are language immersion programs. That’s true in both the public and private sectors. Since 2012-13 (the first year for which data is available on the SFUSD website), overall kindergarten applications are down 15% but the number who listed a Spanish immersion program as a 1st choice is up 15% and the number who listed a Mandarin immersion program as a 1st choice is up 41%. In the private sector, Presidio Knolls (Mandarin) and La Scuola (Italian) both opened in 2012-13 and German International School opened in 2014-15.

While Presidio Knolls has grown from inception to 66 kindergartners today (the same as Chinese-American International School (CAIS), the other private Mandarin-immersion school), SFUSD continues to offer just 66 slots split across two schools. There is still unmet demand: for 2023-24, Mandarin immersion was the first choice program for 130 kids while 498 listed either or both of the Mandarin programs as one of their ten choices. Many of those paying to go to CAIS and Presidio Knolls might have been happy to attend SFUSD if they could get in to a Mandarin immersion program.

While Mandarin and Spanish immersion are gaining popularity, Cantonese programs and biliteracy programs are losing popularity: since 2012-13, first preferences are down 24% for Spanish biliteracy, 29% for Cantonese immersion and a whopping 52% for Cantonese biliteracy. Biliteracy programs require that the child be fluent in the non-English language and there are fewer Spanish-speaking or Cantonese-speaking English learners than there used to be. The number of English learners in 1st grade2 fell from 1,996 (45.6% of all 1st graders) in 2014-15 to 1,431 (37.9% of all 1st graders) in 2022-23.

Transitional Kindergarten

Transitional kindergarten was created when California changed the kindergarten entry date from December 2 to September 2. Kids whose birthdays fell between September and December were no longer eligible for kindergarten but would spend a year in the new transitional kindergarten before moving on to kindergarten. The three month window meant that TK enrollment could never be more than 25% of a normal full grade’s enrollment. Recently, California passed a new law expanding TK to all four-year-olds. The implementation is being phased in gradually. The eligibility window expanded to 5 months (Sep 2 - February 2) in 2022-23, and will expand to 7 months in 2023-24 (Sep. 2 - Apr. 2), 9 months (Sep. 2 to Jun. 2) in 2024-25, and the full 12 months in 2025-26.

This expansion couldn’t have come at a better time for SFUSD. It would have been under great pressure to close classrooms and schools in response to the budget crisis and this would have created a political firestorm. Now, it can close kindergarten classrooms around the city with minimal complaint because it is simultaneously opening transitional kindergarten classrooms in the same schools. By my rough count, about 19 kindergarten classes have closed over the last couple of years and this almost exactly matches the number of new transitional kindergarten classes added.

For 2023-24, SFUSD will have 41 TK classrooms, eleven of which are located in its early education schools and children centers (McLaren, Noriega, Rodriguez, Junipero Serra Annex, Commodore Stockton, and Tule Elk Park), with the remainder in elementary schools. The elementary schools with TK classrooms are generally the less popular schools. There is no TK classroom at Clarendon, Chinese Immersion School, Grattan, Lawton, Lilienthal, Miraloma, New Traditions, Sunset, or Ulloa. Rooftop is probably the most popular school to have a TK classroom.

The will need to find about another 30 TK classrooms over the next two years. Fortunately, the kindergarten consolidation already done should provide most of the needed space. For example, Feinstein ES moved from four kindergarten classrooms to three. If it only has three kindergarten classrooms, that means it will eventually need just three first grade classrooms, three second-grade classrooms and three third-grade classrooms and there will be four empty classrooms that could be used for TK. But it would be silly to have four TK classrooms in Feinstein and none in nearby Ulloa.

SFUSD’s plan is to have TK classrooms in every school. When the popular schools start offering TK, that will encourage more parents to enroll their kids in TK because a child who is in TK in a school has priority to stay in that school for k-5. Getting in for TK will be seen as a way to beat the odds in the kindergarten admissions lottery. Essentially, all the angst and tension will move from kindergarten admissions to TK admissions. To make things even more interesting, the full implementation of TK coincides with the planned implementation of the new Student Assignment Policy.

Misreported Enrollment

I thought I’d finish this post with this week’s illustration of SFUSD-can’t-do-basic-administrative-things-correctly. This one’s a doozy: SFUSD is not reporting correct numbers for kindergarten and transitional kindergarten enrollment.

• Some of the early education schools that offer TK, namely Zaida Rodriguez, Junipero Serra Annex3, and Jefferson Early Education School, don’t exist as far as California’s Department of Education is concerned i.e. they don’t appear in CDE’s School Directory. That means their enrollment doesn’t appear in SFUSD’s Enrollment Reports. Other EES that offer TK (such as Noriega, McLaren, and Tule Elk Park) do appear in these reports. I’m guessing/hoping this doesn’t prevent SFUSD from claiming funding for these students but it’s still odd that they’re attending schools that are unknown to CDE.

• Those early education schools that do offer TK don’t report TK enrollment correctly. they report it as enrollment in regular kindergarten, even though the schools don’t offer regular kindergarten. As an example, in 2021-22 (the last year available), Tule Elk Park, reported 43 “total kindergarten enrollment” but said 0 of them were in the TK program when it should have been all of them. This explains why the TK enrollment SFUSD reported to CDE (355) is lower than the enrollment figure it used internally (430). See these CDE reports on TK enrollment for details.