Gage Middle School had the biggest enrollment drop of district middle schools from 2011-12 to 2015-16. (Photo: gagespartans.org)

Middle school enrollment has consistently declined over the past 10 years in district schools. One school lost 858 students. But charters and magnet programs are growing. 

LA Unified is attempting to quell the enrollment drop-off as 133,000 students have left the district since 2006-07 and middle schools have emerged as a key battleground.

During the past 10 years, the district lost more than 41,581 students from fifth to sixth grade. Even after accounting for the growth of charter schools, nearly 15,000 students simply vanished from the public school system.

LA School Report obtained enrollment data for each district and charter school since 2011-12. The data on district and charter middle schools can be downloaded and searched here. Check out your own school’s enrollment change over the last five years.

Read more: Exclusive: Where have all the middle school students gone? The key battlefield in LAUSD’s enrollment drop

Here are some highlights from the data:

DISTRICT SCHOOLS

The district middle schools with the largest enrollment declines from 2011-12 to 2015-16 (not including enrollment in magnet programs):

1. Gage Middle School lost 858 students
2. Obama Global Preparation Academy lost 613 students
3. Nightingale Middle School lost 570 students
4. South Gate Middle School lost 558 students
5. Wilmington Middle School lost 548 students
6. Peary Middle School lost 532 students
7. Gompers Middle School lost 528 students
8. Sutter Middle School lost 525 students
9. Virgil Middle School lost 512 students
10. Stevenson Middle School lost 481 students

Just 12 of 83 comprehensive middle schools increased enrollment in the five-year period. Three middle schools opened during the timeframe: Walnut Park Middle School STEM Academy, Walnut Park Middle School School of Social Justice and Service Learning, which both opened in 2012 and last year enrolled 544 and 491 students, respectively, and Studio School, which opened in 2013-14 and enrolled 264 students last year.

The district middle schools with the largest enrollment increases from 2011-12 to 2015-16 (not including magnet programs) were:

1. Nava Learning Academy School of Business and Tech gained 134 students
2. Nava Learning Academy School of Arts and Culture gained 131 students
3. Edison Middle School gained 120 students
4. Hale Charter Academy gained 62 students
5. Orchard Academies 2B gained 49 students
6. Kim Academy gained 47 students
7. Northridge Middle School gained 47 students
8. Orchard Academies 2C gained 34 students
9. Madison Middle School gained 29 students
10. Nobel Charter Middle School gained 27 students

MAGNETS

One magnet program at Wright Middle School in Westchester closed after the 2012-13 school year, which had enrolled 479 students. The school reinvented itself in 2013 as a STEAM magnet school, which enrolled about 700 students last year.

Previously a comprehensive middle school that enrolled about 1,200 students in 2011, Sun Valley Middle School transformed into three magnet schools in 2013. Its Biomedical Sciences, Engineering and Leadership magnet enrolled 463 students last year, including some high school students. The Engineering, Arts and Technology for Global Progress magnet enrolled 437 students, and its Environmental Studies Through Arts and Sciences enrolled 452 students last year.

Five other magnet programs opened at district middle schools in the past five years at Nightingale Middle School, Le Conte Middle School, Virgil Middle School, Dana Middle School and Bancroft Middle School.

Here are some magnet programs that have had enrollment increases in the past five years:

1. Eagle Rock Jr. High School Gifted, Highly Gifted and High Ability Magnet (which includes some high school grades) gained 339 students
2. King Middle School Environmental Studies Magnet gained 216 students
3. King Middle School Film and Media Magnet gained 182 students
4. Dodson Middle School Gifted-High Ability Magnet gained 137 students

CHARTERS

Eighteen new independent charter middle schools authorized by LA Unified opened within the past five years, district data show. The largest school is Aspire Centennial College Preparatory Academy in Huntington Park, which opened in 2013 and enrolled 542 students last year.

Eight charter middle schools closed within the past five years.

One of those schools was Urban Village Middle School in Baldwin Hills, which opened for one year with 68 students and then closed after it hadn’t addressed several violations identified by LA Unified’s Charter Schools Division and the school board revoked its charter.

Some Partnerships to Uplift Communities charter schools saw big enrollment gains, but one reason could be because at least two of the schools combined their middle and high school programs.

Here are the charter middle schools with the biggest enrollment gains from 2011-12 to 2015-16:

1. PUC Community Charter Middle School gained 423 students
2. PUC Triumph Charter Academy gained 395 students
3. Amino Westside Charter Middle School gained 341 students
4. Watts Learning Center Charter Middle School gained 220 students
5. Amino Jefferson Charter Middle School gained 175 students
6. Valley Charter Middle School gained 145 students
7. James Jordan Middle School gained 130 students
8. PUC Nueva Esperanza Charter Academy gained 93 students
9. Amino Western Charter Middle School gained 93 students
10. Amino Wheatley Charter Middle School gained 80 students

Here are the charter middle schools with the biggest enrollment declines (20 students or more) from 2011-12 to 2015-16 that did not close:

1. PUC Santa Rosa Charter Academy lost 91 students
2. Alliance College Ready Middle Academy #4 lost 28 students.

LA Unified is fighting a costly enrollment slide, and its biggest battleground is middle schools.

As the district has lost 133,000 students since 2006, data show the biggest consistent declines in enrollment outside of high school over the past 10 years occur when students enter sixth grade.

And the drop has become more pronounced in recent years.

“There is this exodus that does happen in the middle school grades,” said school board member Ref Rodriguez. “When you have a choice and an option, parents look for those other options.”

In the 2007-08 school year, there was a 10 percent decrease in the number of sixth-graders enrolled in district schools compared to fifth-graders the year before. Last year, the decline was 16 percent.

During the past 10 years, the district lost more than 41,581 students from fifth to sixth grade. Even after accounting for the growth of charter schools, nearly 15,000 students simply vanished from the public school system. 

The district middle school that saw the biggest decline in enrollment over the past five years was Gage Middle School, though part of the decline was intentional, officials say.

In 2011, 2,569 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders attended the Huntington Park school as of that October, according to district enrollment data. The students were staggered on a year-round calendar because there wasn’t enough room in the school for all of them to attend classes at the same time.

Five years later, at the start of school last fall, enrollment was down to 1,707 students. The school has been on a traditional calendar for three years.

Principal Cesar Quezada said part of the enrollment decline is because the district opened two schools — Walnut Park Middle and Orchard Academies — to ease the overcrowding at Gage.

But another reason Quezada believes that students are leaving Gage Middle School is because of the growth of charter schools.

“In terms of the Huntington Park community, there are so many different charter schools in this area,” Quezada said.

Rena Perez, director of LA Unified’s Master Planning and Demographics, said it is unclear why sixth-grade enrollment consistently declines in district schools. She said her office doesn’t track individual students. But charter schools might have an influence.

According to independent charter school enrollment data compiled by LA Unified, there has been a steady and dramatic increase of students in charter schools in sixth grade compared to fifth grade.

In 2015-16, there was a 90 percent increase of sixth-graders enrolled in charter schools compared to fifth-graders the year before.

“It would appear that, yes, there is some increase in enrollment from fifth to sixth grade at charter schools that might account for the decrease in enrollment at district schools,” Perez said.

However, when looking at the raw numbers there is still a portion of students who are leaving district schools and not ending up at charter schools.

For example, there were 41,657 students enrolled in fifth grade in 2014-15 at district schools. The next year, there were 35,125 sixth-graders enrolled at district schools — a loss of 6,532 students.

At independent charter schools, there was an influx of 4,624 students in sixth grade in 2015-16 compared to fifth-graders the year before, which means about 1,900 students left the district schools and went somewhere other than a charter.

When looking at the entire 10 years of enrollment data, 41,581 fifth-graders in district schools did not enroll in sixth grade in district schools. During that timeframe, charters gained 26,748 students in sixth grade who were not enrolled in fifth grade. That meant 14,833 students left the district and did not enroll in an independent charter school authorized by LA Unified.

Rodriguez opened the district’s first charter middle school in 1999 and later co-founded a network of independent charter schools, Partnerships to Uplift Communities, located in northeast Los Angeles and the northeast San Fernando Valley.

“Families were fine with their local neighborhood elementary school. They loved them,” Rodriguez said. “Once they were getting to the place where they were having to make the decision about sending them to a large middle school, they were just having a conflict about that.”

Rodriguez said parents wanted a small, nurturing environment in middle school, like their children had in elementary school. Many charter schools offer smaller class sizes, while middle school classes in district schools are typically 30 to 35 students.

“In my opinion those that have the means go to private and those that have options go to charters,” Rodriguez said.

Gregory Vallone, principal of Mulholland Middle School in Lake Balboa, isn’t convinced that charters are the sole reason for the enrollment slide. He points out that private schools have been scooping up LA Unified students for years.

“I don’t say it’s just charter schools. I think it’s the whole gamut,” he said. “We’ve got to offer the best program we can offer and something that is really going to meet the needs of our school community.”

Robotics has been part of the answer for Mulholland Middle. Vallone will to open the district’s first robotics magnet program at his school when classes begin tomorrow. It will enroll about 220 students.

Vallone also worked to change the culture of the school when he became principal five years ago. In 2008, the school had nearly 1,900 students and was projected to enroll less than 1,000 students next year. Vallone said the school is expected to have 1,450 students enrolled this week.

It didn’t take a “magic pill” to reverse the enrollment decline, Vallone said.

“It’s a multi-faceted approach to problem solving,” he said.

The school implemented restorative justice and allowed teachers to teach an activity they were passionate about in the morning advisory period, such as guitar, dance and Italian. Students can choose which activity they enroll in, Vallone said.

Last year the school was recognized for its high attendance rates, and incidents of school discipline declined, Vallone said.

“We built something that kids wanted to come to,” he said.

Some schools do attempt to make a large middle school feel smaller as well. Quezada said at Gage, students are divided into academies, which students are assigned to in sixth grade and stay in throughout middle school. Academies have different areas of focus, like performing arts and health sciences.

“The whole purpose is just to personalize the learning experience for students,” he said.

Rodriguez also thinks another reason for the enrollment slide is that some families may be moving out of the city and the district’s boundaries, especially working-class families who can find cheaper housing and better schools outside of LA.

A 2007 district analysis of enrollment data and population trends titled “Why is LAUSD’s enrollment declining if the LA region’s population is growing?” found that population growth in LA County (7 percent from 2000 to 2005) does not include households with school-aged children. The study also found that families that had children within LA Unified boundaries were migrating out of LA, likely to San Bernardino and Riverside counties.

Since being elected to the board last year, Rodriguez has put a spotlight on middle schools with the establishment of a group focused on “Reimagining the Middle Grades.”

Rodriguez said he wanted to bring attention to the middle school grades because of the decline in enrollment seen in 6th grade in district schools and also because district middle school student test scores aren’t as high as scores in elementary and high school.

One measure, the new student accountability system data developed by six California school districts including LA Unified called the California Office to Reform Education (CORE), found that students in middle school scored an average of 60.35 on the 100-point scale, slightly edging out elementary schools, which averaged 59.1. High schools included in the data scored an average of 65.2.

• Read more: LAUSD middle schools in the CORE accountability index: the same old story on race and location applies

A total of 714 LA Unified schools were entered into the CORE system. Independent charter schools were not included, nor were special education centers, early education centers, adult education centers and continuation schools.

District enrollment data show that there is also a decline in enrollment between 9th and 10th, 10th and 11th and 11th and 12th grades in high school. This does not necessarily mean that students are leaving district schools, but it could be that students who enter high school in 9th grade aren’t receiving all the credits they need to be considered a 10th grade student the next school year and the same for 11th and 12th grades, officials said.

Another set of district enrollment data — which shows enrollment at each district and charter school from 2011-12 to 2015-16 — shows that within the past five years, the district has opened a number of magnet programs at the middle school level and a slate of new charter middle schools have opened. The school board has looked to magnet schools to help solve its enrollment problem.

Since 2011-12, 17 new charter middle schools have opened. Eight charter middle schools have closed, bringing the total to 44 charter middle schools operating last year.

Board District 1 in South LA has the highest number of charter middle schools. The most new charter middle schools that have opened since 2011 are located in Board District 7, which includes San Pedro.

There are 83 middle schools in LA Unified. About 57 middle schools have magnet programs, where just a portion of students at the school are enrolled in the magnet program. Since 2011-12, seven such programs have opened, some of which specialize in STEAM or medical and health science. There are four district middle schools where the entire school is a magnet program.

At Gage Middle School, Quezada hopes to expand its magnet program from 280 students to 350 students next school year. The school’s Science, Technology, Engineering and Math magnet program was created in 2003. Quezada said there is a waiting list.

The principal also hopes to create a dual language immersion program at the school since some of the feeder elementary schools offer such a program. He hopes that students will be able to continue their language training at the middle school level. Quezada also said Gage offers some STEM classes in the summer and on weekends that are taught by Cal State Dominguez Hills students who are aspiring teachers and supervised by credentialed teachers.

“I think those types of programs will certainly help our particular school be more attractive and be more marketable for our students and parents,” he said. 

Next: The middle schools that gained — and lost — the most.

As those inside the district voice a repeated refrain that declining enrollment will likely plunge LA Unified into bankruptcy, new data show it still attracted nearly the same number of kindergarten students last year as it had nine years earlier when it had 133,000 more students overall.

The data come as a surprise amid declining enrollment as the county’s birth rate has dwindled and parents have opted to send their kids elsewhere as charter schools proliferate and many suburban school districts continue to outperform LA Unified.

In 2006-07, the district had 49,896 kindergarteners enrolled as of the October “norm day” an enrollment count used to allocate resources and funding from the state. Nine years later, 49,289 students were enrolled in kindergarten at the beginning of the 2015-16 school year, the data show.

School board member Monica Garcia highlighted these numbers at the last special meeting the board held aimed at tackling its long-term financial situation. She expressed hope that the district can hang on to those students through graduation.

“Let’s keep them,” Garcia said of the kindergarteners.

But the data show, so far, the district isn’t.

The class of 2006-07 kindergarten students, has turned into 36,876 ninth-grade students in 2015-16, a 26 percent decrease. The students will graduate in 2018-19.

And the data show the decline is happening as early as first grade. The number of district kindergarteners who have gone on to first grade has decreased over the past five years, plummeting 17 percent just last year.

In a memo to the Board of Education, Chief Facilities Executive Mark Hovatter, whose office compiled the data, wrote that the increases in kindergarten enrollment “may not be a true indication of future enrollment growth.” He said transitional kindergarten has led to an increase in kindergarten enrollment.

Transitional kindergarten students are included in the kindergarten data, although district officials did not say how many of those students were in transitional kindergarten. So it is unclear how much transitional kindergarten has affected the numbers.

Transitional kindergarten was established by the state Legislature in 2010. It essentially created a two-year kindergarten program.  Teachers must have a credential, the curriculum is a “modified” version of the kindergarten curriculum and students are generally in school for a full day. Since implementation in 2012, the state rolled back the eligibility date one month each year from Dec. 2 to Sept. 2. Now students can be enrolled in transitional kindergarten if their 5th birthday falls between Sept. 2 and Dec. 2. If a student turns 5 on or before Sept. 1, the student enrolls in kindergarten.

“It increases the total pool of children that are counted to be in kindergarten,” said Rena Perez, director of the district’s Master Planning and Demographics.

Transitional kindergarten was piloted in the district in the 2010-11 school year, with 36 classrooms. The following year, the transitional kindergarten program grew to 109 classrooms, and it has continued to expand.

Carola Matera, an assistant professor at Cal State Channel Islands’ School of Education who specializes in early childhood education, said she believes transitional kindergarten has a big impact on enrollment numbers.

She said parents who might have opted to send their child to private school are attracted back to the public school district by transitional kindergarten. She said because transitional kindergarten teachers must be credentialed and receive professional development and support, the program is more attractive for parents than some private school options.

“All of this builds a level of confidence to go back to the public school system to take advantage of it,” Matera said.

She also said transitional kindergarten was highly marketed in Los Angeles, especially to Latino parents, and in the media when it was implemented.

“The other aspect of this is that for parents who would have gone to private schooling, they saw this as an opportunity to start early,” Matera said.

No one can say for certain whether the district’s kindergarten enrollment would be declining without transitional kindergarten, but the data shed light on the trends.

The number of kindergarten students decreased 6 percent from 2006-07 to its lowest point in 2010-11 with 46,934 students. Then, after transitional kindergarten began, the number of kindergarten students steadily increased every year since to 49,289 in 2015-16.

In contrast, the number of kindergarten students enrolled in charter schools steadily increased over the 10-year period, as the number of charter schools in the district grew. From 2006-07 to 2015-16, the number of children enrolled in kindergarten increased 179 percent from 2,556 to 7,131 students.

Kindergarten is not mandatory in California, so some parents don’t enroll their child in school until first grade. Before transitional kindergarten was implemented, the district saw a jump in the number of students that enrolled in first grade compared to kindergarten.

Dean Tagawa, who heads the district’s Early Childhood Education program, said one reason for the boost in kindergarten enrollment could be that more parents are opting to enroll their children now that the district has a two-year kindergarten program. Parents who might have kept their children out of kindergarten for a year because they felt their child wasn’t ready are now enrolling their kids in transitional kindergarten, he said.

“We know there’s a group of parents that really like the idea of having a ‘TK’ option, in the past they might not have utilized kindergarten,” Tagawa said.

Matera said it’s too early to determine what impact transitional kindergarten had on whether parents opt to keep their child in the school district for first grade.

The number of first-graders in the district has fallen 22 percent since 2006-07, according to the data. From 2006-07 to 2009-10 there was a small increase in the number of students who attended first grade from kindergarten. But in 2010-11, the opposite trend occurred. The number of first-grade students as compared to the previous year’s kindergarten students dropped each year. Part of the reason for that drop could be because of the expansion of transitional kindergarten — students are staying in kindergarten for two years and so some of the kindergarten students in the data are not eligible for first grade.

The Independent Financial Review panel assembled last year that released a report in November addressed declining enrollment and made several recommendations about ways to increase enrollment.

The panel of outside experts found several reasons for the district’s declining enrollment, which has dropped 100,000 students over the past six years. The group estimated that about half of the enrollment loss is due to increased enrollments in charter schools. The remaining loss could be attributed to declining birth rate, students dropping out of school and students moving to other school districts, the panel said in its report.

Data from LA County show the birth rate has fallen dramatically in the last 20 years. In 1990, there were 204,124 births throughout the county. In 2011, there were 130,312 births, according to a briefing from the Department of Public Health’s Office of Health Assessment & Epidemiology.

The health department also found that the number of children under age 10 living in the county has fallen nearly 17 percent since 2000.

The study pointed to a number of factors for the declining birth rate, including a decline of people migrating into LA County and an increase in the number of people migrating out of LA County, likely caused by the recession; a rise in unemployment; changes in contraception methods used by women; women getting married at an older age, and an increase in the proportion of women who don’t have children.

Birth rates have decreased for mothers from all racial backgrounds, the study found.

The Independent Financial Review panel gave the district and school board a number of recommendations on how to improve enrollment. It recommended that the district focus on which students are leaving the district and why. It said that any improvements the district made in reversing the trend of declining enrollment “must start with analysis of which students are being lost, at which grade levels, at which schools and why.”

Amid the expansion of independent charter schools in Los Angeles, the district has taken steps to attract more students and their parents to LA Unified, including expanding magnet programs, opening pilot schools with smaller enrollment and expanding dual-language program offerings. The district hosted a forum this past weekend on sharing best practices between pilots, magnets and charter schools.

The Independent Financial Review panel recommended that district officials do extensive follow-up with students and parents who have opted to leave the district. LA Unified has said it will conduct surveys of those leaving the district.

Garcia, who is the school board’s longest-serving member, said she believes there are many reasons why students are leaving and those reasons vary across the diverse district.

She said she thinks the absence of student achievement across the district has contributed to the decline in enrollment, as well as families that opt to send their children to schools with smaller class sizes, the declining birth rate and the exodus of families from Los Angeles amid the housing crisis.

“I think it’s great that we’re interested in learning what is happening with the families,” she said.

Scott Schmerelson

The LA Unified board today put itself on record as opposing a proposal that originated with the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation to expand the number of charter schools in the district in the years ahead.

By a 7-0 vote, the board made it clear that it would do what it could to discourage the effort by the Broad-affiliated group, Great Public Schools Now, to grow what is already the largest charter school population of any school district in the country. At the same time, the board vowed to intensify efforts toward improving educational opportunities within traditional district schools as a way to discourage more students from moving into charters.

“We have thrown down the gauntlet to big business to be very careful with how they deal with LAUSD,” said Scott Schmerelson, whose resolution was also supported by all the district’s labor partners as well as many parents. “They will not take over our district.”

The vote followed a lengthy and sometimes passionate debate in which the board’s vice president, George McKenna, emerged as a surprise supporter of charter schools as an option to traditional schools. Rarely has any member, apart from Mónica García, expressed such unvarnished support for the role charters play in LA Unified.

It was McKenna who introduced the idea in debate that any school that educates a child is a valuable asset, saying, “I don’t care who saves my kids. Just save my kids.”

McKenna also had a kind word for Broad, saying he doesn’t consider the billionaire philanthropist “a villain.”

“We have not as a district admitted our culpability and our own ineffectiveness in dealing with our children,” McKenna said, adding, “What are we committed to, more than ‘Go. away, go away.’ I don’t believe in bogeymen.”

Underlying the board’s discomfort over the charter plan is the district’s slowly declining enrollment, a trend exacerbated by the appeal of charters to many parents. Even now, tens of thousands of LA Unified students are on charter school waitings lists. For months, the district has been struggling to develop ideas on how to stem the outflow.

In expressing support for Schmerelson’s measure, McKenna said, “I’m not anti-charter; I’m not for charters, either. I want to make our schools work, first, to make them competitive so we can compete on our terms.”

A spokesman for Great Public Schools Now said the group would have no response to passage of the resolution.

A major point within the debate was whether to keep the language general or to specify Broad as the originator of the plan that has roiled the district since it was introduced last summer. It was revised late last year to include support for some district schools as well as charters, in part as a response to harsh public reaction.

Mónica Ratliff wanted to insert Broad’s name but settled on the name of the plan. She said, “Eli Broad must know the impact on the district in the long run if that plan was to go forward. This plan was not created to strengthen LA Unified. I want that to be on the record.”

She added, “He’s a smart guy, that Eli Broad. He did not come up with this willy-nilly. There is public consternation with the plan, and it’s become a softer gentler plan and that did not happen without pubic speaking out in a lot of different areas.”

Ultimately, the board discussed various options and concluded to leave the wording that the board would “stand opposed to internal and external initiatives that seek to reduce public education in Los Angeles to an educational marketplace and our children to market shares, while not investing in district-wide programs and strategies that benefit every student whom we are sworn to serve.”

Prior to the debate, a parade of supporters and detractors made their sentiments known to the board members. A group of charter school employees expressed support during a morning meeting, and opponents, including the district’s labor partners, criticized the plan later in the day.

Richard Vladovic raised concerns about the ramifications of declining enrollment that the Broad plan would create. He had originally thought he was going to talk about how the district is too big and recommend making the district smaller, but said privately, “I didn’t think the board would be unified in this resolution.”

Board President Steve Zimmer said he appreciated the board’s coming together to give “a statement that fully recognizes the spectrum of lenses we have on this board.” He said, “I want to call to my own and all of our own higher angels today and moving forward.”

Zimmer said the board “needs to look at the models for of excellent schools across all sectors that have been identified and invest in all schools and if there’s philanthropic investment to make them excellent then why wouldn’t we encourage that?”

Earlier in the day, the board unanimously passed a Ratliff-sponsored resolution that called for making charter schools as transparent in providing information to parents as traditional schools are required.

Sarah Angel of the California Charter Schools Association said although she wasn’t thrilled with Ratliff’s resolution, there was more cooperation in working with Ratliff to refine her resolution than there had been with Schmerelson, who did not meet with the association in crafting his measure.

“These two resolutions are a contrast of public policy,” Angel told the board. She said Ratliff’s resolution “although not perfect, is not draining time and resources away from charter students. On the other hand, we had a different experience with Mr. Schmerelson. Myths and charter rhetoric made its way into the resolution and continues polarization and politics.”

After the vote, Angel added, “There is the sense right now that the school board is more open than before to seeking genuine solutions and common ground, hopefully without sacrificing urgency on behalf of families that need better schools. We’re hopeful that the loudest and most extreme voices on all sides will quiet down and give way to authentic, results-focused collaboration for students. Education should never be an ‘us versus them’ situation, and we all have the opportunity right now to find a third way.”

After more than a decade of declining enrollment, the impact of which is costing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue losses, the district has a plan to stop, or at least slow down, the exodus: Marketing!

Now, officials just need to decide on a plan.

Each year the district loses an average of 2.6 percent of students attending traditional public schools — that’s about 56,000 students per year. District officials estimate that every 3 percent drop costs the district $100 million in funding.

While reasons for the declines are attributed to lower birth rates, outward migration from the city and the growth of charter schools, the board’s Committee of the Whole, chaired by Steve Zimmer, has taken up the issue to make LA Unified schools more appealing to families.

“We don’t have a strategic plan right now to present ourselves and what we do best,” he said at a meeting on the subject yesterday.

Board member George McKenna floated the idea of strategic promotions that would include hiring a marketing specialist, deputizing local school “ambassadors” to spread the word about successful programs and making better use of the district’s public television station, KLCS.

“We can put candid, taped testimonials where kids talk about, ‘I love our school, and parents can talk about, ‘I love our school,’ ’” he said. “It’s our television station. We don’t have to ask other channels like ABC or CBS or cable channels to give us PSAs; we can do it.”

Other proposals included the expansion of magnet schools and specialized instruction, door-to-door sales pitches, family literacy programs, and the greater investment in early education programs.

Principals also have to start thinking of themselves as Mad Men/Women.

“They need to take on the role of marketers,” McKenna said, and the sentiment was echoed by Zimmer and board president Richard Vladovic.

With so much competition from private, parochial and charter schools, administrators have to be more aggressive than ever, Vladovic said.

“This is a different time,” he said. “Parents are more mobile. They have more choices…if they don’t like something, they’ll leave immediately,” he said shaking his head.

By the current formula, which calculates how much money goes to districts based on student attendance, about $292.4 million will no longer flow to LA Unified’s public schools in the 2014-15 school year.

At a special school board meeting today, during which the board members discussed the district budget for this year and next under California’s new Local Control Funding Formula, Megan Reilly, Chief Financial Officer for LA Unified, said district projections indicate the enrollment problem is only going to get worse.

In the 2015-16 school year the district expects to lose another 2.9 percent of non-charter students, bringing that group’s enrollment down by 72,000 students over two years. It would make it the 12th straight year of enrollment decline.

Reilly attributes the steady loss of students to the increasing popularity of charter schools. “About 44 percent of the movement has been to charters,” she told school board members.

But the majority of the decline is due to demographic changes as Southern California birthrates decline, and people are moving out of the area.

As a result, Reilly warned board members to “pay special attention to the district’s fixed costs which don’t change when enrollment declines.”

“They can start taking up more of your budget,” she said.

That’s especially true when it comes to paying out pensions and health benefits for retirees which continue to grow.

Board member Steve Zimmer tried to provide a ray of sunshine on the gloomy news.

“You’re basing these figures on charter enrollment that we’ve already approved,” he said, perhaps suggesting that the school board may want consider restricting charter application approvals, something the board has been accused of not doing.

Although he acknowledged “we have work to do in terms of children being born,” Zimmer suggested the board could devise strategies to boost enrollment and retain more area students.