Darsha Philips of Channel 7 interviews parent Hugo Henderson at Hyde Park Early Education Center last Tuesday morning. (Courtesy: LAUSD)

How many students actually started school last week at LA Unified?

It’s a question that the second-largest school district in the country is a bit sensitive about, especially because enrollment means money.

The media cavalierly bandied about a wide array of numbers that may not seem significant but can equate to a difference as big as the entire populations of cities such as Santa Monica or Beverly Hills.

When Channel 7 interviewed school officials before dawn last Tuesday, the report was “more than half a million” students were heading to school.

On the same day, the Los Angeles Times reported “542,000 in the district-operated schools” and “charter enrollment has grown to more than 101,000.”

Fox-11’s headline declared: “For LAUSD: 640,000 students head back to class.”

KPCC reported there were “roughly 514,000 students who returned to classes,” and the Los Angeles Daily News reported there were “550,000 kids returning to roughly 1,000 schools across Los Angeles” and that “another 101,000 students will return to charter schools.”

All of those media outlets that collectively came out to 10 school sites last Tuesday received a blue folder including a sheet of Fingertip Facts with the district’s latest enrollment numbers. (Some media outlets received more than one of those folders, district officials noted.) The older Fingertip Facts are still online on the district website but are expected to be updated any day.

The Fingertip Facts that were handed out showed that 528,066 “regular and affiliated charter” students from elementary, middle, high and special ed schools were enrolled in the district. The number of independent charter school students was 107,142.

That makes a total of 635,207 students that LA Unified is responsible for, and if the adult education school population is included, the number increases to 705,075.

But not even that number is quite accurate.

“You can imagine that with a district this large, you can get different numbers from different departments, but we are trying to be as accurate as possible,” said Daryl Strickland of the LA Unified Communications Department. “We are giving a number that is a snapshot at that moment in time, but it’s constantly changing.”

And, in fact, the number handed out last Tuesday isn’t totally accurate because it was missing the early enrollment numbers, Strickland said.

Strickland muses that many of the media are using statistics they have used in the past for consistency in their own sites. But this is a school district that at one time topped 750,000 students and is now facing persistent declining enrollment which costs millions of dollars.

Meanwhile, the 2016-2017 Fingertip Facts now show there are 1,283 schools and centers in the district, including 221 charter schools. There are 94 languages other than English spoken with a breakdown of 74 percent Latino, 9.8 percent white, 8.4 percent African American and 6 percent Asian.

The facts also show that the number of district employees went up from 59,823 last year to 60,191 at the opening of this school year.

That is, for now.

On Friday morning, more than 100 parents were lined up outside Walter Reed Middle School in Studio City waiting for a permit to get their child into one of the district’s Schools for Advanced Studies. One dad spent the night on the school steps.

No, it’s no April Fool’s joke. Getting into one of LA Unified’s popular magnet or dual-language programs, or one of the many other choices, is a complicated process of deadlines and forms, and a lot of waiting.

At a special school board meeting earlier this week, Superintendent Michelle King said her staff was proceeding with a unified enrollment process that would make the application process easier and prevent parents from having to camp out in front of their child’s school just to get them in a better program.

However, the simplified process will not include any of the charter schools that are overseen by the district, which seems to fly in the face of King’s public declaration to avoid the “us vs. them” mentality between traditional schools and independent charter schools within LA Unified.

School board member Ref Rodriguez, who helped start charter schools in the northeast Los Angeles area, told LA School Report that parents should be informed about the charter school options in their area at the same time.

“I’m really enthused about this step forward, but we didn’t bring all the gear, there’s still a missing piece of this equation, the charter school,” Rodriguez said.

He doesn’t think that all parents will want to flock to charter schools.

“I have a hunch that it would be the opposite,” Rodriguez said. “I come from the charter world, and I know that most families want their neighborhood schools to work, but they don’t always know what’s available. I think this works in the district’s favor to do this.”

Ref Rodriguez wants charters included in unified enrollment.

A unified enrollment system with one deadline and application period for all area schools has been established in Denver, New Orleans, Newark and Washington, D.C., but has caused controversy in other school districts considering such a plan, such as Boston and Oakland, and raised concerns among some charter organizations about a loss of autonomy. Rodriguez said he was familiar with the Washington plan and that it helps with diversity and ensures that charters are not “cherry-picking” the best students.

Jesus Angulo, LA Unified’s director of Counseling and Student Services, is in charge of putting together the unified enrollment plan. At the moment, there’s no specific deadline, no specific funding and they’re not sure if it is going to be developed in house or by a firm outside the district.

“We are in the exploratory stage,” said Angulo, who said the biggest changes will be to shorten the sometimes eight-month-long process to no more than six weeks and put it entirely online. The hope is to offer a search engine with the available choices, career pathways and other comparable data.

For now the district plans to combine deadlines for magnet schools, SAS schools, early education, International Baccalaureate programs, dual-language schools, Zones of Choice schools and other programs.

“Right now we are only considering district schools, not charter schools,” Angulo said. “We are streamlining our own internal process and what we can control within our district.”

The idea for a simplified process came when King was assistant superintendent, but now it’s being fast-tracked even as funding is being sought.

Sarah Angel, managing director of advocacy of the California Charter Schools Association, said, “It’s encouraging that the district is trying to better engage families. Clearly it should be easier for parents to explore their options and choose the best public school for their children. But charter schools are public schools, and more than 100,000 Los Angeles families are already choosing them.”

Angel added, “So it seems reasonable that charter schools would at least be invited to be part of the discussion about a common enrollment process for families. If district leaders are serious about treating all public school students and parents with the same care and concern, then charters should be part of the conversation.”

Rodriguez said the different deadlines with charter schools can create unnecessary competition because a parent may be waiting to get into a district magnet school, but then they are accepted earlier into a charter school. Two or three months later, they are accepted into the magnet program, but the family already has a relationship with the charter school so they stick with them.

“By including the charter schools, it gives charters the advantage of quicker enrollment, but it also allows schools to plan properly for next year,” Rodriguez said. “We have to try to see if this system works in this district.”

He said it is important to see if charter schools will sign on to the idea. Now that the schools will all be connected via the district’s MiSiS computer system, such a process could be easier.

“I’m really grateful that LA Unified is going to the united enrollment of their choices, but we should be thinking more broadly,” Rodriguez said. “We should have conversations with our charter parents. Does it make sense to include all the options for the district?”

Rodriguez said some of the district’s mentality is still that charters are not part of LA Unified. “That is the biggest frustration I have on both sides. I know Ms. King really does mean that it’s not us vs. them, but the machine only knows how to see the world in one way. The charter world is the same way, they want to be part of the district when it makes sense and do not want to find solutions together when it doesn’t. There are parallel systems fighting most of the time and not working together for the kids.”

After hearing about the long lines outside Walter Reed Middle School, Rodriguez said, “If you’re a low-income person you do not have the time to take off or spend the night at your child’s school. You shouldn’t have to do that. Families need to be informed of their choices, and there’s not choice if people are not informed. They can’t make that decision properly if charters are taken out of the equation.”

LAUSD board member George McKenna at Tuesday’s board meeting

“Forty years ago we were in competition with private schools. Now, we’re in competition with charters.”

That was LA Unified board vice president Steve Zimmer yesterday, speaking at a board committee meeting where the issue at hand was district enrollment. The number of kids attending the district’s traditional schools has been declining since 2003, now hovering around 650,000, from a high of about 750,000, according to a presentation to the committee.

The dip reflects, in part, a slowing birthrate in the district that began in 1996 and is projected to increase only slightly over the next few years or so.

But the rise of independent charters is an unmistakable factor, as well: Data from the California Charter Schools Associations shows that the number of independent charters within LA Unified rose to 206 this year from 132 in 2009.

And more are on the way. KIPP, for example, has opened two of nine planned for the district.

The impact of charters on LA Unified is something of an evergreen debate among board members, faced with the district’s losing revenue for every child who forsakes a traditional district school for a charter. It’s a trend with heavy ripples, as lower enrollment leads to fewer dollars, fewer dollars lead to flat wages, flat wages lead to fewer and angry teachers, and angry teachers are now talking about a strike.

But this week, the discussion of charter impact took on a slightly different tone, as board members at their meeting on Tuesday and again yesterday turned introspective, questioning themselves over how to mitigate some of the enrollment trends.

Instead of blaming charters for siphoning off children whose parents want and can contribute for better educational outcomes — a usual and not incorrect assertion — several members pressed the board to do more to make LA Unified school competitive with them.

George McKenna was especially assertive on the issue, describing the district as the elephant that’s being “eaten one bite at a time, and we’re being eaten alive.”

“We may not be to blame, but we are responsible,” he said at one point. “Somebody’s got to fix this. If not us, then who?”

Superintendent Ramon Cortines took it a step further: “Our people are going to have to become more competitive,” he said, adding that the solutions “are not going to come from here; they’ve got to come from out there.”

The problem, of course, is what to do.

As McKenna reminded the board, state laws require the district to approve and renew charter applications unless something is obviously wrong with the requests. This week, for example, 15 charters came before the board for approvals. Only one was denied.

McKenna suggested one possibility, that the district hire professional fundraisers to entice wealthy Angelinos to keep the district in mind when making donations.

“I don’t know how small, independent entities can overcome a behemoth like LA Unified if we put our resources to it,” he said.

More likely, board members will have to find their answers elsewhere, including the usual spectrum of curricula, quality instruction, modernized buildings, upgraded technology — in short, all the usual issues that members wrangle over during the course of just about every meeting.

This week, though, for some inexplicable reason, the issue of enrollment decline seemed to take on a new urgency, as if a critical mass had been reached a point demanding new strategies to staunch the bleeding.

Beyond Cortines’s expressing frustrations over some charters’ unwillingness to share “best practices,” board members refrained from criticizing charters for acting in bad faith. To the contrary, they applauded them for providing options that deliver quality education, with Zimmer, for one, defending the “sanctity of family choice.”

At the same time, he said, it’s imperative for the district to take action to give parents the same options within LA Unified as they’re finding outside.

“We have no choice,” he said, “but to address that choice.”

The deadline for applications is Friday, May 24. More information is available here. The enrollment application can be found here.

According to the LAUSD website, approximately 9,000 seats are available at about 270 schools, and all schools will have reference lists in their main office with the names of the campuses with available open enrollment seats in 2013-14.

For unofficial updates, check out Hope Change Choices, a blog about parental choice in LAUSD that’s co-directed by LAUSD teacher and tech coordinator Rustum Jacob.