SFUSD Enrollment Numbers are Wrong

TK enrollment is undercounted

SFUSD’s published enrollment figure for 2023-24 (48,736 students) is wrong. It undercounts the actual enrollment because some transitional kindergarten students are not included in the count.

Let me explain why I’m so confident the numbers are wrong.

TK and PreK

A decade or so ago, when California’s budget was in good shape, the decision was made to offer an additional year of education to all students. This transitional kindergarten year is often described as the first year of a two-year kindergarten program. When initially introduced, it was only available to those who turned five between September 2 and December 2 but the eligibility window is being expanded gradually. In 2023-24, it was available to students who turned 5 between September 2 and April 2 and by 2025-26, it will be “available to all children who will have their fourth birthday by September 1 of the school year.”¹

Preschool or Pre-kindergarten (PreK) comes before TK. Children who turn three on or before December 1 are eligible for PreK. PreK works very differently than the rest of the education system. It is not funded in the same way: there are need and income-based qualifications and some sites accept tuition-paying students. PreK is also almost completely invisible. The CDE doesn’t report on PreK programs. I’ve never seen a SFUSD report on PreK enrollment. PreK rarely comes up in board presentations. The DAC received presentations on a wide variety of topics but not preschool programs.

TK and PreK in SFUSD

The district offered TK in 36 separate sites in 2023-24 and another 12 are being added in 2024-25 to accommodate the eligibility expansion. The district offers preschool programs at 30 locations² . Many of those programs are located at elementary schools. An elementary school may offer TK only (e.g. Alvarado, Huerta), PreK only (e.g. Taylor, Grattan), both (e.g. Carmichael, McCoppin), or neither (e.g. Lilienthal, Sunset).

SFUSD also operates a bunch of Early Education Schools (EESs). Some of these EESs, such as Theresa Mahler Children Center in Noe Valley or Tule Elk Park in the Marina, have their own distinct locations. Others are co-located with an elementary school but have a different name, which presumably provides some educational benefit beyond employment for a second Principal:

• Las Americas Children Center is located in the same complex as Moscone ES in the Mission. Las Americas is listed as one of the preschool choices but does not appear in SFUSD’s list of schools offering early education. Moscone ES is not listed as one of the preschool choices but does appear to offer PreK in the list of schools offering early education.

• Raphael Weill Children Center shares the same address as Rosa Parks elementary.

• Leola Havard Early Education is now colocated with Carver ES in Bayview. It moved a couple of blocks because its old site³ is now is poor condition.

There are two early education sites that SFUSD has closed but which it hasn’t bothered to notify CDE about. Sarah Cooper Children Center used to be on the site that is now leased to a charter school (New School of SF) and Presidio Early Education used to be on the site in the Presidio that is now a private preschool (Cow Hollow School). Nevertheless, they are still both listed as Active in the CDE directory.

Measuring Enrollment

The CDE doesn’t have responsibility for PreK education so it does not require school districts to report on preschool enrollment. Some of the early education sites only offer PreK programs. SFUSD does not need to report enrollment for these and these sites do not even exist as far as CDE is concerned.

The CDE does have responsibility for transitional kindergarten. Unfortunately, when TK was introduced, the CDE’s systems were not able to cope with the concept of a new grade. Their enrollment reports just lumped transitional kindergarten students in with regular kindergarten students⁴. Elementary schools that offered TK would appear to have very large kindergarten enrollment relative to other grades because the TK and K students would be counted together.

In the recently released enrollment reports for 2023-24, the CDE has finally been able to treat TK as its own grade. This doesn’t change the overall enrollment numbers. Some students just move from the K bucket to the TK bucket. Alvarado ES reported 103 kindergarten students in 2022-23 of whom some unknown number were TK. In 2023-24, it reported 18 TK students and 87 K students.

The fun starts when we look at the early education schools. Some early education sites offer both PreK and TK and SFUSD does need to report TK enrollment for these.

The district does report the TK enrollment at Commodore Stockton, Noriega, Tule Elk Park, and McLaren.

It doesn’t report the TK enrollment at Junipero Serra Annex (Bernal), Zaida Rodriguez (Mission) and Argonne EES (Richmond). According to the 2023-24 enrollment report, a total of 125 TK students were assigned to those sites (25 to Argonne and 50 to both of the others) but they do not appear in the CDE enrollment reports.

I checked to see if they might have been included in some other location’s numbers:

• Junipero Serra Annex is a couple of blocks from Junipero Serra ES and Argonne EES is a couple of blocks from Argonne ES. I checked to see if the TK numbers from the EES might be included in the neighboring ES’s figures. However, both elementary schools reported zero TK students because neither had its own TK program and neither was reported its namesake’s TK students either. Zaida Rodriguez does not have a neighboring elementary school.

• The district reported 66 TK students at central office. It seems unlikely that these are the students from Argonne EES, Rodriguez, and Serra Annex because the number is too low. I compared the number assigned in the enrollment round with the reported enrollment at all of the other sites and found that they generally agreed well. Across the other 33⁵ sites, 902 assignments resulted in enrollment of 765 TK students, for a yield of 85%. The schools with the lowest yield were Malcolm X, El Dorado, and Bret Harte, schools that always have trouble enrolling students who are assigned to them. If you exclude them, the average yield would rise to 89%. It’s very unlikely that the 125 assignments to Argonne EES, Rodriguez, and Serra Annex would produce only 66 students, for a yield of only 53%.

Why Does This Matter?

1. Counting students is a pretty basic task. If the district can’t be trusted to count students correctly, how can any of its other numbers be trusted?

2. School district funding is based on attendance. If the district isn’t reporting how many TK students are enrolled at those three schools, is it measuring those students’ average daily attendance? School district funding is largely a function of daily attendance so if SFUSD is not measuring their attendance, it’s not getting paid for educating them. In a budget crisis, it’s silly to leave money on the table.

3. SFUSD is contemplating closing schools. It’s unclear whether preK and TK enrollment is going to be factored in to the discussion of which schools to close. It’s unclear how it should be factored in since preK and TK programs were historically placed in schools that had low K-5 enrollment because those were the sites with space.

Note

It’s Summer and even unpaid substack grouches need a break. This will be last post for a few weeks.

1. https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/Immunization/School/tk-12-transitional-k.aspx

2. The main pre-kindergarten page says 36 but I presume that’s just an error.

3. There used to be a Peter Burnett Elementary school on this site but that closed decades ago. A Peter Burnett Child Development Center subsequently opened on the site and this was renamed after Leola Havard in 2011. Other parts of the site are still operational for other purposes.

4. There was an entirely separate report that attempted to parse out how many of the K students were actually TK but that report contained obvious errors last time I looked at it.

5. I excluded Mission Education Center, which as a newcomer school, gets a lot of Spanish-speaking students who arrive in the country after the March enrollment round. It nearly always has enrollment figures in every grade that exceed the number initially assigned to it in March.