Enrollment Rises Less Than State Estimated : Education: Fewer students will eliminate $250 million from budget. Ventura County is following the small-growth trend.

California public school enrollment is not increasing as fast as had been expected--a bright spot in an otherwise gloomy 1992-93 state budget picture.

The state Department of Finance had been predicting an increase of 212,955 students in kindergarten through high school next year but has lowered the estimated increase to 191,414.

That translates into a 1992-93 budget savings of about $250 million, a blessing for Gov. Pete Wilson and legislative leaders as they try to fill a state budget gap of $10.7 billion.

“A few more of those and maybe we can get somewhere on settling this thing,” said a legislative staff member who is involved in the budget negotiations.

The estimate also turned out to be too high for the current year when 46,693 fewer students showed up than were expected in California’s 1,010 school districts. That saved the state about $95 million.

Statewide enrollment grew from nearly 4,394,993 in the 1987-88 school year to 5,018,235 this year and the state estimates enrollment of 5,209,765 for 1992-93.

Ventura County’s student enrollment has steadily increased about 2% a year over the past eight years, said Ken Prosser, an official with the county’s superintendent of schools. “We’re growing but not by a whole heck of a lot.”

In an era of tight budgets and little money to build schools, many school districts have increased class size and cut into educational programs.

Now the influx seems to be slowing.

Assistant Finance Director Cynthia Katz said the reasons have “a lot . . . to do with the sluggish economy--the word is getting around and fewer people are coming to California.”

Mary Heim, of the finance department’s population projection unit, said total migration to California dropped from 454,000 in 1989-90 to 274,000 in 1990-91.

Most of the decline came in domestic migration, which fell from 208,000 in 1989-90 to 22,000 the following year. There was little change in immigration or the ratio between births and deaths.

“It’s very typical in recession times for this to happen,” said Heim, who noted that there was a similar decline during the recession period of 1982-83.

Carol Corcoran, a department demographer, said that “most of the slowing has been in Southern California” and that the change “has had a pretty telling effect on school enrollments.”

However a spokesman for the Los Angeles Unified School District said the district is not yet predicting a slower increase in enrollment.