Vallejo schools average 46% full amid crowded classes and a teacher’s resignation
Vallejo City Unified School District was once within a step of collapse. Mismanagement in the early 2000s brought the district to the brink of bankruptcy, and the state stepped in with a $60 million emergency bailout. The money saved Vallejo’s schools from complete financial collapse but kept the district under state oversight until summer 2024. Around the time the state lifted the financial receivership, Aurelio took the helm as superintendent and soon recognized a new set of budget problems.
The district had used COVID-19 relief money to pay staff salaries, one-time funding that evaporated early last year. Enrollment dipped below 10,000 students for the first time and was projected to fall further, and Vallejo schools, on average, were only 46% full, the district says. Rising inflation and contractual pay hikes further strained the budget. The working-class district near San Francisco serves half as many students as it did two decades earlier: enrollment tumbled from nearly 18,000 in the fall of 2006 to about 9,300, according to the district, in a city still struggling to bounce back from the closure of a naval base in the 1990s.
District leaders have closed five campuses since 2025, a quarter of the district’s schools, and have identified up to one-third of all staff positions for possible cuts to help plug a $36 million deficit. In early 2025, Aurelio announced two rounds of closures. The first round shuttered two K-8 schools at the end of that academic year. The school board also cut payroll and relocated a district-sponsored charter school to a vacated campus. Aurelio set a December 2025 deadline for the board to select three neighborhood schools to close in the second round and approve additional staff cuts.
In its second wave of closures, earlier this year, the district shuttered three of its 10 elementary schools. A facilities committee will eventually decide what to do with the vacant campuses, but for now they are vulnerable to burglaries, forcing the district to spend more on security, said Marin Trujillo Cuevas, the district’s executive director for operations.
Aurelio acknowledged that cuts and closures can be hard for families but said they are necessary to correct for school districts and budgets designed for a different reality. “We’re not just closing schools to close schools,” Aurelio said. “We’re right-sizing a district that was built for significantly more kids. And if we’re going to actually improve outcomes for the kids we still have, we need to concentrate resources.” Aurelio began discussing possible closures with families before the board decided which schools would close. “I don’t think I ever said, ‘If we close schools.’ I started by saying, ‘When we close,’” he recalled.
Minutes before the first bell, Penny Núñez-Brandão scanned the crowd outside Glen Cove Elementary School, looking for familiar faces. “I don’t see any,” the fifth grader told her mother one morning in August. “None of my friends are coming.” The start of a new school year can be nerve-wracking under any circumstances, but for Penny and thousands of students across the U.S., this academic year brought the added difficulty of adjusting to an entirely new school after their previous ones shuttered.
Penny’s mother, Kimberly Núñez-Brandão, had already moved her older son to a competing charter school. She recently attended Glen Cove’s curriculum night for families and shared her shock at learning Penny’s new teacher had 32 students in his first class. “They already overwhelmed teachers with 30-plus students,” she said. “Who’s winning here?” She also said, “Families are literally packing up their kids and moving away.”
The strain was visible inside the classrooms receiving extra students that first week of school. Ellen Baker-Valdez, a third-grade teacher at Glen Cove, had 34 children assigned to her classroom. She jammed desks tightly together, with backpacks and lunch boxes piled in a rolling bin by the door. Outside another classroom, a mother cornered Aurelio, demanding to know why her son’s disability records had not followed him to his new school. The child’s teacher — a substitute, like 7% of Vallejo’s teachers that first day — struggled to answer her questions while attending to the many crying students in her class.
Marisa de la Torre, a managing director of the UChicago Consortium on School Research, said instability created by school closures may last for a while. Studies from the University of Chicago show that academically, displaced students often suffer long-term drops in reading and math, especially when they end up at low-performing schools. “It takes a while to recover, if they recover at all,” she said. Núñez-Brandão isn’t sure she wants to stick around long enough to find out.
Caitlin Jackson and her husband, a facilities manager, moved to Vallejo with their toddler son, John, for the relatively affordable homes. Large class sizes and safety concerns dissuaded the new parents from enrolling John in a neighborhood school, so the Jackson family enrolled him at the district-sponsored charter for now. “Trying to downsize a system while also trying to sustain it, that is just very difficult,” Jackson said. She said she hasn’t ruled out private school or homeschooling. Her experience reflects a risk for districts that choose to close schools: the cost-cutting measure may push more families into competing charter networks, neighboring districts or private alternatives, further eroding the funding schools receive per enrolled student.
Along with cutting budgets, Vallejo is renovating older campuses, hoping to draw younger parents who can’t afford to start a family in San Francisco; that spending has rankled some parents, including Núñez-Brandão. Aurelio said he also plans to open a Tagalog-language school soon, targeting Filipino families from across the Bay Area. The district has denied some requests from Vallejo families trying to transfer out; state law requires permission for such transfers. It has also tried to retain families by adding in-demand classes and offering tours of its remaining schools to demonstrate academic programs or extracurriculars they might have missed. Jason Willis, a school finance expert with WestEd who has studied campus closures in the Bay Area, credited Vallejo for spreading the cuts and closures over several years and trying to show parents what the district could offer. He likened the approach to the enrollment and recruitment efforts charter schools have long used to enroll students.
The Núñez-Brandão family had already experienced one earlier reassignment. Five years ago, as her older son prepared for his fifth grade year at Glen Cove, the district reassigned him along with Penny — then a kindergartner — to Highland Elementary due to scheduling difficulties during the pandemic. “They’re doing it all over again,” Núñez-Brandão said of her daughter’s experience this year. “And I can promise you: More schools are going to close.”
Weeks into the new school year, Penny still struggled with the transition to Glen Cove. She started to make new friends and said she feels comfortable on campus. She also liked her teacher, a first-year educator who had joined Vallejo’s teacher residency program, launched last year to attract new educators and improve retention. But with 32 kids in the class, she said it is hard to concentrate. Then, on a Tuesday in October, Núñez-Brandão received a note in the Glen Cove parent portal: Penny’s teacher resigned, effective immediately. The school will rely on a long-term substitute for now, the district said. That night, Núñez-Brandão decided to call a competing charter school in Vallejo — a campus she and Penny had already toured — and ask whether it still had room for her daughter.
Beyond Vallejo, an Associated Press analysis of federal education data collected by Stanford University economist Thomas Dee and sociologist Jaymes Pyne found that nationwide public school enrollment fell by more than 1.4 million students, roughly 3%, between fall 2019 and 2024. The total number of schools has declined too, but only to about pre-pandemic levels, the researchers found, suggesting closures are lagging enrollment declines. New research shows student enrollment has fallen much faster than schools are closing, suggesting more painful financial choices lie ahead. Big Local News at Stanford University counted 1,156 schools closed during the last academic year, the highest number since the pandemic. The Associated Press covered school closures in partnership with The Hechinger Report and Big Local News at Stanford University.
Lower birth rates were the primary reason for the enrollment decline, and U.S. birth rates continue a multidecade slide. The Associated Press analysis also cited “a federal crackdown on immigration” and the post-pandemic expansion of private school vouchers and homeschool options as contributors, and the report described districts closing campuses as state and federal education funding came under pressure. Bellwether and WestEd, two research groups, estimated that declining enrollment could cause schools to lose $11.5 billion in state revenue annually by 2030-2031, potentially prompting widespread layoffs, cuts to academic programs and school closures. California has recorded one of the nation’s most precipitous enrollment drops, while large systems in Cleveland, Houston and Philadelphia face similar closures.
Research cited in the Associated Press report found that closing schools rarely yields the financial relief districts hope for: busing students to their reassigned schools, severance for pink-slipped staff and security for empty facilities often eat up any savings, and closures can set students back academically while making it harder to attract teachers who may worry the jobs aren’t stable. The report said closures can lead some families to choose charter, private or other schools or districts, reducing enrollment and per-student funding. In Vallejo, some parents said they chose to homeschool this fall or were planning to sell their homes and move to neighboring districts. Lydia Rainey, research principal at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, said the enrollment and financial situation is unlikely to improve. “That’s extremely wishful thinking,” she said. “States aren’t about to open the coffers and swoop in with additional funds to save schools.”
Cherry Salazar of Big Local News at Stanford University and Sharon Lurye of The Associated Press contributed reporting. The Associated Press disclosed that its education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations and that AP is solely responsible for all content.