Enrollment continues to fall in Paso Robles. Could it be forced to close a school?
It’s a tough job, Brad Pawlowski said: Figuring out how to educate students when those students are disappearing.
“We are focusing on making sure that we have a district that’s appealing with successful athletics and academics,” said Pawlowski, the Paso Robles Joint Unified School District’s assistant superintendent of business services. “But we’re appealing to fewer and fewer families, it seems.”
The northern San Luis Obispo County school district is — once again — considering closing a school campus as its enrollment continues to drop.
A big reason for declining school enrollment in the picturesque wine country city could be the very reason people visit the area: It’s increasingly becoming a home for tourists and retirees, not for budding families.
“The main reasons why the families that move away are moving away is the cost of living here,” said North County-based Realtor Heather Roda. “The main reason why we see those empty nesters, retirees and investors come to Paso Robles is tourism and wineries.”
A city unsuitable for families doesn’t bode well for the local school district, which relies on high daily student attendance to fund its operations.
“The fewer the students we have, the less money we have,” Pawlowski summed up.
Paso Robles school district considers closing school campus
Essentially, the school district gets roughly $12,000 from the state for every student who shows up to class, according to Pawlowski. Since the Paso Robles school district is down about 530 students from the 2016-17 school year, that’s a nearly $6.4 million reduction in state revenue, Pawlowski said.
Down to about 6,300 students from their peak enrollment of a little more than 6,900 students in 2007, Paso Robles school district officials say they see empty seats in classrooms.
A capacity study commissioned by the school district found this month that it has a total of roughly 490 empty seats if all classes were to be completely full. That’s larger than the entire enrollment of one of the district’s elementary schools, according to the study.
That fact has helped keep the discussion to possibly shutter a school campus alive.
The school district has recently convened a 25-member district advisory committee to examine enrollment projections, district capacity and the future of Georgia Brown Elementary School’s Spanish-English dual immersion program. Their recommendation to the district’s board of trustees will help determine whether a campus closes and if the dual immersion program should move to another campus.
The committee’s formation comes after the district attempted to proceed with its $15.5 million renovation plan for the Georgia Brown campus.
Discovery of an unknown geologic anomaly — which could be an active earthquake fault or remnants of an old riverbed — halted those plans. The school district was left reconsidering whether it was worth the money to renovate the 1940s-era campus or simply consolidate, questions the advisory committee should help to answer.
Declining school enrollment due in part by lack of family housing in Paso Robles
Looking around town, some could be confused why the Paso Robles school district finds itself in the position of possibly closing a school campus.
Housing construction abounds in the city. In 2022 alone, the city issued permits for more than 300 new housing units — most of which were for apartment units — to be built in the coming years, according to the city’s planning department.
“My guess is we’ll definitely see students coming out of these new developments,” said Warren Frace, the Paso Robles community development director. “But the reality of what happens will depend on the market — housing and job market — and whether things turn out to be suitable for families to move here.”
The growth of tourism and attractions for wealthier home buyers is a relatively recent development that happened to coincide with the real estate boom between 2020 and 2022, Roda said.
With housing affordability at a 16-year low statewide, median home prices staying north of $800,000 and interest rates hovering around 7%, new families moving to the area are at a significant disadvantage to more established buyers, she said.
As recently as early 2022, interest rates were still below 4%, and a strong seller’s market at the time meant prices softened, with more inventory going on the market every day.
Even when prices started to creep out of range for most buyers, low interest rates still made signing a mortgage an appealing prospect for families getting into the housing market, Roda said.
Retirees, second-home buyers — not families — moving to Paso Robles
Since interest rates spiked in the summer of 2022, though, Roda said she has seen a shift in who is selling their homes and moving out of Paso Robles — and San Luis Obispo County.
“It used to be that most of my clients that moved out were the retirees — they stayed here and worked at a job that they had locally, and when they retired, they sold their house and took their retirement income and their equity from their house to another less expensive state,” Roda said. “Over the past couple of years, I’ve had quite a few more families moving to other states, like Oklahoma and Tennessee.”
Realtor Michael Massey, who operates in North County, said he’s observed a similar trend in his sales.
Many of the clients he’s helped find homes in Paso Robles are empty-nesters, who won’t add students to the school district, or are buying second homes in San Luis Obispo County, he said.
“The last client I showed a property to are the same situation,” Massey said. “They live up in San Jose, they’re selling their (second) home ... for $2.2 million, and they’re buying a very similar home here for about $750K.”
As if the housing and job market woes weren’t enough, Pawlowski also worries about trends such as declining birth rates in the county and increasing enrollment in nearby charter and private schools.
“Our best strategy is to provide the best education possible,” he said. “Not much else we can do.”
This story was originally published October 25, 2023 at 8:00 AM.
