Enrollment at California’s public schools continued to drop for the sixth straight year, with a loss of nearly 40,000 students between this year and last. The situation was especially dire in the six-county Bay Area, with declines nearly double that of the state. “It’s good that this drop is not as much as last year, but this is on top of two consecutive years of historic declines in enrollment,” said Heather Hough, the executive director of the Policy Analysis for California Education, a Stanford-based research center. “The fact that enrollment is continuing to decline is very concerning.” Today, there are just over 5.8 million students at California’s K-12 public schools, according to data released by the California Department of Education on Tuesday. It’s the second year that figure has dipped below six million — a benchmark which, before 2022, the state hadn’t seen for two decades.