One in Seven: The Students Simi Valley's Public Schools Never See

In Simi Valley, roughly one in seven school-age children is educated outside public schools — while the district's state test scores trail the neighboring districts that families compare it against. The cost of their absence is reshaping the budget.

EDUCATIONSIMI VALLEY NEWSFEATURED

Adam R Loew

9/10/20267 min read

In an era of school choice, Simi Valley families are not choosing Simi Valley Unified. On the most recent statewide tests, the district's students scored essentially at the California average — 50 percent meeting the English standard, 37 percent in math — while neighboring Conejo Valley, Las Virgenes and Oak Park posted results 15 to 30 points higher.

On any given weekday morning, more than 2,000 Simi Valley school-age children are learning somewhere other than a Simi Valley Unified classroom — at Grace Brethren or St. Rose of Lima, at kitchen tables following lessons their parents chose, or logged into online classes that serve students around the world. No single government file tracks them. But stitched together from Census surveys, state filings, and district budget documents, their numbers tell a story quietly transforming one of Ventura County's largest school districts: roughly 12 to 15 percent of Simi Valley's school-age children — about one in seven — are being educated outside the public school system.

For a district that has lost more than 400 students in three years, their absence is not an abstraction. It represents an estimated $27 million to $36 million a year in state funding the district never receives, at a moment when credit rating agencies are sounding alarms about its finances. The school board has to decide what to do: last month, Simi Valley Unified Board of Trustees member Mike James suggested at a board meeting that the district consider how it might "rein homeschoolers back in," the Simi Valley Acorn reported.

The Ones Who Pay to Leave

Simi Valley has never sent all of its children to public schools: Census data going back a quarter century shows that roughly 12 percent of the city's enrolled students attend private schools, a remarkably stable pattern.

State records show 11 brick-and-mortar private schools operated in Simi Valley last school year, together enrolling 1,356 students. Grace Brethren's elementary and junior/senior high schools account for roughly 750 of them, followed by St. Rose of Lima, a Catholic school with 220.

Local private school enrollment, meanwhile, has drifted downward — from 1,442 students in 2023-24 to 1,423 the next year to 1,356 last year, a 6 percent decline over two years that mirrors a 6.6 percent statewide drop. Some families also travel to private schools outside the city, such as Chaminade in West Hills or Oaks Christian in Westlake Village; Census data that counts families by where they live suggests the true local total is closer to 1,500 to 1,900.

The Children No One Counts

Homeschooling families are harder to find, because California barely counts them. The state requires families who homeschool on their own to file a one-page affidavit; last school year, 49,365 California children were educated this way — the first decline on record, of 3.7 percent. But that captures only one of three legal routes. Many more families enroll in independent study programs run by public charter schools, where children are counted — and funded — as public school students. Simi Valley Unified runs its own independent study program through Monte Vista School, so some local homeschooling families are already inside the district's enrollment numbers.

The best available estimates come from Census surveys analyzed by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, which put California's homeschooling rate at about 4.4 percent of K-12 students in 2023-24, down slightly from 4.9 percent the year before — even as homeschooling keeps growing nationally, to an estimated 6.3 percent of American children, according to the National Home Education Research Institute. Applied to Simi Valley's roughly 18,500 to 19,000 school-age children, those rates suggest between 700 and 950 local children are homeschooled — roughly half the size of the city's private school population, and a prize big enough that pulling even a fraction of those families back would matter to the budget.

The $13,000 Empty Desk

In California, school funding follows attendance: districts are paid roughly $13,000 per student per year through the Local Control Funding Formula, according to Simi Valley Unified's latest budget documents. Children who never enroll generate no money — and the district's enrollment keeps sliding.

Simi Valley Unified served 15,417 students in 2023-24, then 15,308, then 15,081. When classes resumed Aug. 12, the district opened with almost 15,000 students across its 28 campuses — better than the 14,764 projected in March, but still down from the year before. Superintendent Hani Youssef told the board that the district enrolled 860 kindergartners this fall, down from just over 900 last year and more than 1,000 in years past, even as transitional kindergarten grew to 655 students. "We're graduating more seniors than we're enrolling in kindergarten," Youssef said. He attributed it to falling birth rates and families moving out of state, rather than to dissatisfaction with local schools.

But demography does not explain the students at the center of this story. The roughly 2,400 Simi Valley children in private schools and home study still live here, and a free public education sits a short drive — often a short walk — away. Parents pay out of pocket for the alternative: $8,277 a year for one child at St. Rose of Lima, more than $16,000 at Grace Brethren's junior and senior high school. Homeschooling parents typically trade a second income for a kitchen-table classroom. Whatever is driving those decisions — faith, class size, pandemic habits, a child's particular needs — it is not a birth rate.

At $13,000 per student, each year's shrinkage strips roughly $1.5 million to $3 million from the district's $200 million general fund. In June, Fitch Ratings downgraded the district's bond rating to A, citing "enrollment declines and the exhaustion of one-time state and federal pandemic aid."

The hypothetical is larger still. If the 2,100 to 2,800 local children in private schools and home study all enrolled tomorrow, the district would gain an estimated $27 million to $36 million a year — roughly 14 to 18 percent of its general fund. New students bring new costs, so the honest description is opportunity forgone, not money lost. Transitional kindergarten — the state's expanding program for 4-year-olds — remains the district's clearest growth engine, because every TK student is a future kindergartener.

Compete or Keep Shrinking

None of this means Simi Valley families are fleeing failed schools or bad teachers. But the district is not an academic standout either, and families who shop for schools can see the numbers. On the spring 2025 statewide tests, 50 percent of its students met or exceeded the state standard in English and 37 percent did so in math — essentially average for California, where the figures were 49 and 37. The neighboring districts that families compare it against score far higher: Conejo Valley Unified posted 66 percent in English and 56 in math; Las Virgenes Unified, which serves Agoura Hills and Calabasas, posted 70 and 59 in 2024; Oak Park Unified, among the state's top performers, posted 80 and 72.

Test scores track family income closely, and Simi Valley's student body — 46 percent socioeconomically disadvantaged — is less affluent than those of its neighbors. But for a family weighing a free public education against tuition or a parent's career, the comparison is not theoretical. The districts next door post better scores, and the private schools market smaller classes. Whatever else drives the one-in-seven, Simi Valley Unified is not, on paper, a district that sells itself.

The exodus, in other words, is two stories at once: a demographic story about how many children Simi Valley has, and a choice story about where those children go. Youssef has leaned on the first. At his 2024 State of the Schools address, he noted that enrollment fell just 3.3 percent from 2018 to 2023 — a smaller decline than the state as a whole, Ventura County or neighboring Conejo Valley Unified. "We credit that 3.3% to the work that we're doing and the confidence the community has for us," he said, according to the Simi Valley Acorn.

But the comparison only softens the blow; it does not stop it. Demography is shrinking the district by roughly 100 to 250 students a year. Choice, stable for decades, is what keeps roughly one in seven children outside the public system entirely. Until both turn, the schools will keep getting smaller and the budgets tighter.

For the community, the numbers are a reminder that public education in Simi Valley is a choice most families still make — about 85 percent of them — but no longer a choice all families make. Youssef has framed the district's role in that competition plainly. "We take every young student that we get and we appreciate every family that entrusts us with their children," he told the board in August.

The question James raised — how to rein homeschoolers back in — is the only question that matters, and it demands more than a board member's turn of phrase. It demands a district that competes. Simi Valley Unified has done it before: two years ago, Youssef credited new programs with holding its decline to 3.3 percent while neighboring districts bled students faster. That is the playbook. Expand Monte Vista. Open the high school teams and the advanced courses to homeschoolers who want a piece of them. Build programs the private schools and the districts next door cannot match — and market them like the district's survival depends on it, because it does. Every family those programs win back is $13,000 a year and a seat that doesn't go empty. Every year without them, the classrooms keep shrinking and the deficits keep growing.

The one in seven who learn elsewhere are invisible in the district's enrollment reports. Their absence is visible only in the budget lines that keep getting smaller.

Sources:

Editor's note on quotations: All attributed quotations are real and published: Superintendent Youssef's August 2026 remarks and board member Mike James's comment are from the Simi Valley Acorn's Aug. 29, 2026 report on the Aug. 18 school board meeting; Youssef's 3.3 percent comparison is from the Acorn's May 18, 2024 coverage of his State of the Schools address.

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