Back in 2017, Santa Barbara Junior High had 759 students. This year, it has 502. The coming gain is hopeful, but still far from recovery. In most California districts, enrollment decline means a direct hit to budgets because schools receive funding based on average daily attendance. But Santa Barbara Unified School District (SBUSD) is community-funded, meaning the majority of its revenue comes from local property taxes rather than per-student state funding. In other words, the district isn’t in immediate financial peril from shrinking numbers. The significance is different — it’s about shifting demographics, uneven enrollment, and campus-level imbalances. SBUSD’s student population has dropped by more than 2,000 students in the past 10 years, shrinking from 15,593 in 2015 to 13,336 in 2025, according to California Department of Education data. At the same time, the share of socioeconomically disadvantaged students has risen from 52 percent to 61 percent. Behind both striking statistics are a number of complicated drivers, including birth rates and movement out of and within the district. The contraction of an enrollment dip and a demographic shift is complex. It is not because more low-income families are arriving, but because middle- and upper-income families are more likely to leave. The result is a district that is both smaller and serving a student body with greater needs. External factors are also driving declines. “It’s a super multifaceted problem. Declining enrollment is a trend that has been predicted for many years, just based on declining birth rates,” said Dr. Heather Hough, Senior Policy and Research Fellow at PACE (Policy Analysis for California Education), a Stanford-based research center focused on statewide education trends, equity, and funding. “It really accelerated during the pandemic. Another driver of declining enrollment besides birth rates is relocation out of high-cost areas. We saw a lot of migration out of those high-cost areas into lower-cost areas, some of that in the Central Valley, but also out of state.”