At 9:40 a.m. on Sept. 2, dozens of students at Orchard Hill Elementary School streamed into the sunshine to run off their first-day-of-school jitters at recess. One kid sprinted so fast, he lost a shoe.
But the joyful scene was less vibrant than it might have been five years ago, before the Almeda Fire. Orchard Hill is still down by more than 100 students.
Many school districts across the state are seeing declining enrollment for other reasons, like a decreasing birth rate and a move toward private schools or homeschooling.
But the Phoenix-Talent School District saw a sudden drop after the fire and is still down by more than 300 students, over 12%.
‘Families had to make the tough choice’
Superintendent Brent Barry said the district was able to cushion the blow at first by busing kids in from across the county, wherever they had found housing.
But that solution only worked for so long, and Barry said housing hasn’t come back fast enough.
“It's tough for a second or a third grader to be on the bus 45 minutes to an hour each way, in hopes that housing would come to fruition in the next year or two,” he said. “But when that wasn't happening, families had to make the tough choice.”
Some chose to leave. The district’s enrollment hasn’t rebounded since then.
In 2022, the state allowed Phoenix-Talent and three other districts affected by wildfires to use their 2019-2020 enrollment numbers, rather than their current headcounts, to calculate state funding. They received a total of $25 million.
“What we have discovered in all of the districts that suffered like Phoenix-Talent is that enrollment has not returned,” said State Sen. Jeff Golden (D-Ashland). “They're building on it. They're doing their best to adjust, but they are in more dire fiscal straits than other school districts in the state.”
This year, a pair of similar bills tried to give these districts more money, but they didn’t pass.
“Unlike the 2020 fire year, which really registered with legislators in a very big way, the need to extend this extra support because enrollment hasn't recovered didn't really register,” Golden said.
‘We’ll get students back’
Meanwhile, the Phoenix-Talent district is still trying to serve the students it does have, even as declining enrollment means less money from the state and federal governments.
“We're still feeling it,” Barry said. “We're still responding. We're still supporting families and providing for our kids.”
The district has been reducing its staff through attrition for the last few years. This year’s budget is okay, but Barry said next year’s might have some challenges.
He hopes that, somehow, in the next few years, the district will make up the hundreds of students it lost.
“We know that this area is going to continue to grow, and we'll get students back,” he said. “It's just a matter of if we can bridge that time and keep as many programs and offerings as possible to when that happens.”
Of course, he had hoped enrollment would have bounced back already. But he acknowledges that recovery is slow and unpredictable, and he's proud of what the community has accomplished.
“I think we did a lot in five years, maybe more than other communities, but it's just the nature of what a natural disaster does, especially fire,” he said. “When things burn to the ground, everything is gone. It's nothing that I've ever experienced and hope to never experience again.”
Golden said he also originally thought the region would bounce back more quickly than it has.
“We had a rush of optimism, I think, because of the incredible community response. We had groups without much resources making things work in that first year after the fire,” he said. “And maybe that bled over to an idea that we'd be entirely restored earlier than was realistic.”
Barry said the district is interested in innovative solutions to increase enrollment, like partnering to develop a property it has for sale to bring in revenue and create more housing.
Back at Orchard Hill Elementary, that long, slow process of rebuilding is momentarily forgotten as kids scream on the swings and chase each other across the wood chips.
When it’s time for class, one girl in a butterfly t-shirt doesn’t want to go and lingers, banging on the drums.
Eventually, the teachers get all the students back inside, where they sit at their desks, unconcerned with the challenges the district is facing.
