For the 2025-26 school year, the projected enrollment for the Healdsburg Unified School District (HUSD) is just 1,000, according to a report from HUSD Superintendent Chris Vanden Heuvel, and with already declining enrollment the school board is interested in having a conversation about the possibility of allowing interdistrict transfers, a conversation that got tabled in 2019 due to wildfire and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We had a conversation about how small is too small for our district,” Vanden Heuvel said on March 16 during a board meeting, referencing a 2019 board discussion.
“I want to pose that question again. We’re not going to make a decision tonight, but I do want to ask, should we examine ways to try to generate more enrollment? If you’d like me to pursue those, we can talk about it at a future board meeting.”
He said severe declining enrollment is being seen just about everywhere in Sonoma County.
“We’re not different in terms of declining enrollment. Thankfully, we don’t have a funding issue coming along with declining enrollment,” he said.
The HUSD is not a Local Control Funding Formula district, meaning the majority of the district’s funding is not tied to attendance and enrollment. Instead, it’s a community-funded district based on local property taxes, commonly called a “basic aid district.”
The HUSD’s feeder districts, Alexander Valley School District and West Side Union School District, are also seeing declining enrollment.
At the HUSD, just six years ago the district had 1,674 total students. This year, there are 1,274 students enrolled, a dip under 1,300 for the first time.
“You can see that we’ve lost over 100 elementary students — 136 to be exact — at K-2 in the last. We’ve lost just about 198 students in 3-5.” Vanden Heuvel said.
According to Vanden Heuvel’s report, the high school and junior high are seeing similar data.
“I think this is testament to how difficult it is to live in Sonoma County in Healdsburg. Over the last few years we’ve had a number of families move out of the county and state and we don’t anticipate that changing,” he said.
Students transferring out of the district to attend other schools plays a small role in district population changes.
Vanden Heuvel attributes most of the student transfers out of the HUSD to two reasons — the nationwide trend of students leaving public schools for private ones post-distance learning, and the HUSD closing the charter school in early 2020.
Students may also leave the district for various other reasons such as for child care-related reasons, to be with siblings or because of continued enrollment.
He said most students leave the district at the early elementary level, including transitional kindergarten (TK) and kindergarten.
Looking into the future, the district looks at TK and kindergarten pre-enrollment information and preschool information in order to project enrollment numbers for future years.
“We roll each class forward based on the latest actual enrollment. We adjust seventh grade based on what we hear from Alexander Valley and West Side about students who are coming to us,” Vanden Heuvel said.
In four years, the 2025-26 school year, the projected enrollment is around 1,000 students. “It will become harder and harder to run the programs that we are proud of, such as FFA (Future Farmers of America), and so I think it does bear the question — ‘Should we potentially start talking about the possibility of opening the district to interdistrict transfers’ — especially in the secondary schools as we see they are going to get smaller and programs will be sacrificed because of a low number of students interested,” Vanden Heuvel said.
For instance, one interdistrict transfer method the board could consider, is having limited availability and to let students in based on class size.
“As a student I would strongly advocate for that,” said HUSD student trustee Annie Petersen.
Petersen said she’s had conversations with students and many say that Healdsburg High School is small and if the district were open to transfer students then maybe they’d have better sports and there would be more people in clubs.
“There’s a lot of talk at the high school and anecdotally about it would be such a cool idea, why is the board not doing it? Personally, I’m kind of passionate about this because I was almost an interdistrict transfer. I actually grew up in Geyserville. We ended up getting to go here because we ended up moving, but I think so much of the reason that I like going to high school and that I’ve had a good educational experience is because I go to Healdsburg,” Petersen said.
Board vice president Rose McAllister said she is definitely open to having a conversation about interdistrict transfers. She said there needs to be a common sense approach to how the district handles transfers.
Trustee Donna del Rey said she likes the current elementary class sizes the way they are, but is open to having a further discussion on the transfer topic. Vanden Heuvel suggested that if they were to pursue interdistrict transfers they could have sixth and ninth grade as interdistrict transfer entry points.
Board president Mike Potmesil asked about the possibility of consolidation of small nearby districts such as the Geyserville school district, which is also community funded.
Vanden Heuvel said there was an initial conversation about consolidation with the Geyserville district about 10 years ago and that they had given the Geyserville district an offer to consolidate but their board at the time turned it down. If the HUSD wanted to consolidate Geyserville, it would be a lengthy process and the Sonoma County Office of Education would be required to conduct a year-long study.
“There are a lot of things at play including employee seniority and teacher’s contracts, salaries, etc. It is certainly something we could explore if the board wanted to formally request something,” Vanden Heuvel.
There’s still much to be discussed about the possibility of allowing interdistrict transfers and the subject will return to the board for further discussion.
