LA Unified Schools: Too Many Seats and Not Enough Students

The LA Unified School District (LAUSD) is one of the largest school districts in the country. They have over the last few decades been in a process of refurbishing and building new schools to accommodate students. The price tag for this is $20 billion. However, demographics are shifting. People are having less children in the areas that were predicted to have large numbers of families. Less children = less students and less demand for seats.

According to an article this weekend from the LA Times:

"The district plans to build campuses that will take hundreds of students from those schools, further reducing their enrollment. By the time the building program is completed in 2012, there will be tens of thousands of empty seats at dozens of once-crowded schools, a Times analysis shows."

The full article is quite informative and can be found here.

The districts need to make accurate demographic predictions about where people with children will live.

I believe that this underscores the problem with planning schools. You are damned if you build too much and there are not enough pupil. But you are SOL and have a major crisis if there are not enough seats for students.