McAuliffe Elementary School in southwest Bakersfield lost 13 percent of its enrollment this past school year. Photograph by Paul Pomeroy/Solorzano Photography

As houses sprung up on Bakersfield’s west side a couple of years ago, thousands of people moved from the eastern half of the city into the west over a five-year period.

But now, the housing boom is over, the foreclosure wave is washing over the city, and it appears at least some of the migrants are having to move back.

The effect, if people keep moving in that direction, will in some cases be eventual redrawing of school boundaries as districts try to distribute their ever-shifting populations.

Precise data on movement from neighborhood to neighborhood is hard to come by. But it’s not hard to see the trends from the agencies that have to keep an exact count of their populations day by day – the schools.

Here’s what the numbers suggest:

• People moved out of Bakersfield City School District, which covers the older, eastern part of town (as well as the newer northeast), and into western districts between 2004 and 2008. The district saw an overall attendance drop of 1,099 students, which amounts to about 10,100 people. (According to Census Bureau figures, 1 in every 9.2 people in Kern County are students in grades K-8.)
• Meanwhile, Panama-Buena Vista, the southwest’s major school district, saw a 23 percent increase – 3,111 students (representing about 28,500 residents).
• And then, in the last school year, people moved out of the west and into the east. BCSD grew by 183 kids (1,700 people) while Panama shrank by 176 students (1,600 people).

At least, that’s what appears to have happened. Nobody is really sure.

“We don’t collect data rich enough to allow us to know these things,” said Steve Gabbitas, spokesman for Bakersfield City School District.

Specifically, no district collects data on where their new students come from, or where they go when they leave.

And – here’s the big caveat – the reverse migration has only been going on for one year. We won’t know until later if it’s a real trend, or just a blip.

But the numbers should come to no surprise to anyone who’s seen their neighbors moving out due to foreclosure or other reasons, and nobody else moving in.

In-town or out-of-town

Migration inside Bakersfield is far from the only factor.

“We had quite a few families who moved in from L.A., and we had a few families from Bakersfield City, and the coast,” said PBV Superintendent Kip Hearron.

At the end of the 2008 school year, there were 1,292 homes in foreclosure in the PBV district, Hearron said. But rental properties in the district were 98 percent full. So when families lost their homes, they had to move outside the district – perhaps back to where they came from.

The influx was similar in the northwest.

“Informally, when we were growing by 600 to 1,000 houses a year we asked occasionally where people were coming from,” said Wally McCormick, superintendent of Norris School District. “Our interpretation was that they were Bakersfield people, many owning businesses or managers in larger businesses, who were moving up in house size and they wanted to get into the Norris School District because they had kids. Since Norris has relatively few starter type homes it made sense. It seemed we were mostly requesting records from other districts in Bakersfield.”

The northwest’s school districts haven’t lost students, but they have seen growth come to a standstill. Norris, for example, nearly doubled in size over five years, then saw just 2 percent growth in the last year. Rosedale saw a boom and then lost population; Fruitvale, already largely built out at the start of the recent boom, barely saw any increase in the first place.

Business as usual

The last year’s reversal of fortunes didn’t have much impact on Bakersfield’s schools, which already deal with spikes and troughs when it comes to annual enrollment.

In BCSD, last year’s increase made little difference. “It really comes out to be like four students per school, so it really doesn’t affect at all having to add new teachers,” Gabbitas said.

And the district is accustomed to dealing with shifting populations. Stella Hills Elementary, a few years back, gained 72 kids, then lost 51 the very next year.

“What happens every year is people move around in the district,” Gabbitas said. The district has tried to figure out why such attendance spikes happen, but it has been a mystery.

Meanwhile, in the southwest, the decline in students isn’t evenly distributed around the district’s 22 schools. It’s schools such as McAuliffe Elementary, in the middle, that have seen the greatest decline, while schools on the edges of the district – generally the newer schools in the newer neighborhoods – have seen less decline, Hearron said. McAuliffe, on Westwold Drive in Haggin Oaks, lost 74 students, 13 percent of its enrollment, in a single year. This resulted in smaller class sizes.

For the time being, the decline in students means the district can shut down some portable classrooms. And the district is looking at possible boundary adjustments for the 2010-11 school year, to better distribute students among the districts.

Bakersfield City passed a bond in 2006 to build three schools, and is still moving ahead with plans for two of them in the northeast. A predicted swell of 1,200 kids in the Rio Bravo area didn’t materialize, but it will eventually.

The question is how many of those 1,200 kids will move from outside the district, and how many will just be BCSD students relocating. A few years ago, the expectation was that Rio Bravo would largely be populated by families moving north from Los Angeles, Gabbitas said. But the housing bust has changed that, and now the district doesn’t really know.

Meanwhile, the two new schools will allow a boundary shift to make some schools smaller. Stiern Middle School, the district’s largest, is one that could benefit from fewer students, Gabbitas said.

Are you the parent of a student who was forced to move across town due to the mortgage crisis? Are you a teacher who had to say goodbye to students whose families lost their homes? We want to know how the housing crisis has affected our schools. Please contact reporter James Geluso at geluso@bakersfieldexpress.org to share your story.

Student population changes from 1994 to 2009, by district. Graphic by James Geluso/Bakersfield Express