Fear and a falling population: How a community keeps itself from improving
Growing up in the Midwest, seeing your team play in the Rose Bowl Game was the ultimate goal for college football fans. Now that I live in Pasadena, I have learned that the Rose Bowl Game is the one for the tourists.
For the locals, the real annual matchup not to miss in the Rose Bowl is the Turkey Tussle. That's the high school football game between Pasadena High School and rival John Muir High School, two schools in the Pasadena Unified School District [PUSD].
But the Turkey Tussle isn't going to happen this year, or perhaps any other year in the future. That's because Pasadena High School had to abandon its football program earlier this year, because there simply weren't enough students left to play.
This is the way a big national story plays out at the local level. You might have heard that America is in another baby bust, due to declining fertility rates. The way that plays out here in Pasadena is with a school district that has lost almost 40% of its students in the past 25 years. If trend continues, the PUSD will lose another 35% of its students in the next decade.
Let’s put that in real numbers. Today, the PUSD enrolls about 13,000 students. That’s down from 23,500 students in 2000. If the current trend line continues, the district will be down to perhaps 8,300 students by 2036. At the 9-12 level, the district might have just 3,100 students in 10 years.
The big reason for the decline? Lower birth rates in the community, which have fallen 63% over the past 35 years. The birth rate is expected to decline another 27% from 2022 to 2032, leading to the lower projected enrollment in 2036, when those 2032 births enroll in pre-kindergarten.
So what is the community, and the school district, doing about this? That’s the problem. They have not done enough.
A school board by itself cannot do anything to improve the national economy, lower student loan debt, build enough housing to make starter homes affordable and to make health care and out-of-school child care more safe, available and affordable – all of which are needed to encourage young adults to get together and start families.
But a school board can, and should, manage its resources to provide the best possible experience for the students who remain in its district. Back in 2013, I wrote that Pasadena can't properly support four public high schools any longer. Today, the district still has four high schools. Those schools have lost and cut sports teams, and arts, language and music programs in the past 13 years. But the district’s leaders have refused to close high schools, despite enrollments that have left these schools among the smallest in the area.
Data from Los Angeles County show that most districts in the county with similar enrollment, including the nearby Burbank Unified School District, have just two high schools. That allows those districts to support a wider variety of in-class and after-school programs, as their high schools have larger enrollments that can provide student and parent support for those programs.
So why are some people in the Pasadena community fighting proposals to reduce the number of high schools in the district?
When you’re getting squeezed, you want to protect what you have at all costs. Closing schools traumatizes students and communities. School closures have been used as a weapon against communities of color in America. Skepticism of school closures is well earned.
But that does not change the math. With declining birth rates and no in-bound migration, a community such as Pasadena faces a clear choice. Maintain the same number of schools and see enrollments fall at the school level, with resulting cuts in programs. Or close schools so that school-level enrollments can stay high enough support the programs that students want and need.
That seems like an easy choice to me. But that choice won’t win popular support within Pasadena, or any other community, until students and parents and alumni and supporters are confident that school closures will result in the restoration of lost programs and not just more of the same pain that the district has been suffering for years.
Experience has taught those of us who don’t live in gilded homes that the future too often brings something even worse. People will not support change until they see a compelling, positive vision for what that change will bring. That’s true in your neighborhood, city, state and across the nation.
Like voters across the country, the people of the Pasadena Unified School District know that things are bad. We don’t need to sell anyone on that. What we need, here and everywhere, is a vision for something better… and a plan for getting there. Without that, our fear of future suffering becomes self-fulfilling.