L.A.’s Early School Roll Shows Strong Increase

The Los Angeles Unified School District enrolled 15,352 new students last week, which could boost total district enrollment to its highest point in nearly two decades, district officials said Monday.

Officials said enrollment as of last Friday, the end of the first week of school, was 564,498, compared to 549,146 at the same time last year.

If the early enrollment trend holds up, officials said, the total enrollment this year could approach the level of 1973, when the district had 607,000 pupils. At its highest point, in 1968, the district had 656,000 students.

At its peak last year, enrollment in the Los Angeles district, the second-largest in the nation behind New York City, was 594,802 pupils in kindergarten through 12th grades.

If the enrollment trend holds firm through at least the first month of the school year, the Board of Education will likely be forced to reconsider expanding year-round schools--a controversial solution to school crowding that was dropped two years ago after a storm of protest from parents.

District officials had predicted several years ago that enrollment would grow by 10,000 to 14,000 students a year through most of this decade, largely because of increased immigration and a spiraling birth rate in Los Angeles County. But the growth dropped off markedly in 1987-88 and 1988-89, averaging 2,000 new students in each of the last two years. Officials attributed the slowdown to confusion and fears created by the federal law offering amnesty to undocumented aliens, which, school officials speculated, may have caused many families to keep their children out of school.

Supt. Leonard Britton said the increase is “in the range of what we had been planning for.”

Last month district officials said fall enrollment would grow by 7,300 to 10,800 students by the end of the fourth week of school in October. Any fluctuations in enrollment usually level out by then, officials say.

Board member Roberta Weintraub said the early enrollment picture means that the board will have to begin addressing “issues we’ve been skirting,” such as year-round schools, a controversial solution to school crowding that currently involves about 140,000 students in 102 district schools.

A year-round school calendar enables a school to serve as many as 50% more students by operating through the summer months. Many parents are opposed to year-round schools because of fears that the unconventional system will disrupt family vacations, complicate child-care arrangements and force children to endure hot classrooms during the summer months.