Enrollment has dropped by over 102,000 students in Los Angeles County K-12 schools in the last 5 years — and they will lose another 212,000 in the next decade according to the forecast by the California Department of Finance.
Those losses will eliminate over 15,000 teaching jobs plus another 15,000 in administration and other support services.
"And now, the rest of the story" was a trademark portion of broadcasts by radio newscaster Paul Harvey.
His in-depth reports offered facts that often changed listeners' commonly held beliefs.
We need someone with Mr. Harvey's guts and experience at the Associated Press to tell us the rest of the story as they bombard us with scary headlines about teacher layoffs at L.A. Unified, about soaring college applications and even about the President's "Race to the Top" education funding program.
The budget cuts for California schools are real, and our local teachers and administrators deserve our sympathy and support as they work to cope with them.
However, each district receives funds based on the number of students enrolled and the AP is simply ignoring the fact that statewide K-12 enrollment peaked in 2004 and more than half of the state's counties were projected to have further enrollment losses this year.
That obviously means less reimbursement from the state to fund education jobs in the affected counties. Readers of my previous editorials may remember the underlying story. California births peaked in 1990 and fell for the next nine years.
High school freshman registration began falling after 2004 as the babies of 1990 passed through