Faced with falling enrollment, the Orange Unified School District is exploring a proposal to consolidate schools, with four campus pairings currently under consideration.
At a June board meeting, trustees took a look at recommendations for merging Imperial Elementary with Crescent Elementary, Prospect Elementary with Esplanade Elementary, Fletcher Elementary with Taft Elementary, and Portola Middle School with Yorba Middle School. The district is in the very early stages, officials emphasized, of the process and no final decisions have been made. A consolidation commssion began meeting in April.
District leaders say consolidating schools would help reduce combination classrooms — where students from different grade levels are placed in a single classroom often due to low enrollment — and create more equitable class sizes across the district.
“Our projections show an additional 3% decline expected through 2034. While this is more modest than our historical decline, it represents continued downward pressure on enrollment,” Sulema Holguin, assistant superintendent of business services, said at the meeting.
In the Orange Unified School District, enrollment in the past decade has fallen by about 4,500 students, or 15%. But the conversation around school consolidation isn’t limited to Orange Unified.
Other districts in Orange County have recently taken similar steps as enrollment continues to decline. Between 2014 and 2024, student enrollment countywide dropped by 14%, or about 68,000 students, according to data from the California Department of Education. Holguin noted that’s roughly the combined enrollment of the Placentia-Yorba Linda, Tustin and Orange school districts.
District leaders also emphasized that consolidation could unlock new academic offerings.
“The more students you have, the more options you can provide so that students can pick from a larger menu when they’re looking at ranking their elective choices, their pathway choices, to go further in things that interest them specifically,” said Tracy Knibb, assistant superintendent of human resources.
Officials said Crescent Elementary is already a popular choice for families in the area. Of the 52 students who live in Imperial Elementary’s boundary and attend Crescent through open enrollment, 32 are in the district’s GATE program, Holguin said.
In the case of Prospect and Esplanade, Holguin said both schools offer similar programs, but Esplanade has been modernized “from the studs up,” and would be eligible for more modernization funding.
“Merging would allow for a larger number of enrollment, which means we would actually have a higher enrollment count to be eligible for those funds,” she said.
State modernization funding is based on student enrollment, which means the more students at a school, the more funding it qualifies for, officials said. For example, a school with 2,000 students would receive twice as much in state modernization dollars as one with 1,000 students.
Currently, 45 students from Prospect attend Esplanade through open enrollment, while 29 students from Esplanade opt into Prospect, Holguin added.
Esplanade has also struggled with combo classes, officials said.
“We had seven combo classes there. We were able to bring that down, but because we don’t have enough classes at each grade level, we have very little flexibility, and ultimately more combo classes are a result,” Matt Witmer, assistant superintendent of educational services, said at the meeting.
For Portola Middle School, district officials cited facilities as a key reason for merging with Yorba Middle.
“Yorba was also one of the schools that was modernized from the studs up, while Portola was not,” Holguin said, adding that the combined enrollment of both schools would be around 800 students.
“When you have more students, 800 to 1,000 students at a school, you can provide more program opportunities,” Witmer said.
But not everyone supports the changes. Parents and teachers voiced concerns at the recent school board meeting, especially around Imperial Elementary’s special education program. Some expressed concern that the close-knit community at Imperial couldn’t be replicated at Crescent, which is a much larger school.
One speaker said her son had been bullied at a bigger school and found safety and community at Imperial. If the school closes, she said she would pull him from OUSD and enroll him in private school instead.
District officials said multiple combination classes at Imperial prompted the district to provide an extra teacher earlier this year to ease the situation.
Holguin said many families in OUSD already take advantage of open enrollment and that flexibility would continue to be prioritized.
“We definitely want to continue to do that as a part of consolidation,” she said.
At the board meeting, trustees directed staff to return with more information at a future date.