Coronavirus in rural America (Part CXXXIV): How rural California schools fared during the pandemic

Last week, I wrote about this feature by Hailey Branson-Potts of the Los Angeles Times, featuring tiny Kneeland, California, in far northern Humboldt County.   Here's a more quantitative look at how California's rural schools fared during the pandemic, by Niu Gao, for Zocalo.  

During the second phase of COVID, in fall 2020, fluctuating enrollments destabilized rural schools. In California, K–12 enrollment statewide declined by nearly 3 percent between the 2019–2020 and 2020–2021 school years. Some rural counties experienced an exaggerated version of this trend; enrollment fell 10 percent in Humboldt, Mono, and Inyo Counties. But other rural counties gained students, bucking the statewide trend and placing greater demands on district resources. Alpine, Amador, Calaveras, El Dorado, Sierra, and Sutter counties experienced double digit growth, with enrollment increasing 17 percent, for example, in El Dorado.

Statewide enrollment dropped another 1.8 percent in 2021–2022 but counties like El Dorado, Calaveras, and Tuolumne continued to experience growth—1.7 percent, 4.5 percent and 3.3 percent, respectively. Because state funding is linked to student enrollment, declines pose significant challenges for districts—but increases create problems too. Rural districts, which have long struggled to recruit and retain quality teachers, had trouble keeping up with growing enrollment. About a quarter of rural schools nationwide were understaffed prior to the start of the pandemic, and 70 percent said there were too few candidates applying for open teaching positions for the 2022–2023 school year.

And in the third phase of COVID, as caseloads declined and California started to emerge from the pandemic in spring 2021, rural schools brought students back for in-person instruction earlier than schools in other parts of the state, in large part because providing online instruction had been so difficult. Nationwide, 63 percent of rural schools offered in-person instruction to all students in January 2021, compared to only 35 percent of urban schools; some rural schools reopened in Fall 2020. Rural districts in California reopened to all grades in early February 2021, while urban districts fully reopened in early May.

As we worked with rural schools during COVID, we also saw hints of progress.