24 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY APRIL 23-29, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com understand our community’s needs,” he says. Some things are not nice-to-haves, but need-to-haves, and the demand for some of those things, like special education, is continuously growing. Eloina Trujillo has been a teacher since 2010, working with kids of all ages. Currently, she’s a multi-tiered system of support acceleration specialist in Salinas City Elementary School District, working with small groups of students or providing one-on-one instruction to kids who need extra help, such as decoding sounds, understanding reading material, or learning multiplication. “Typically, in about six weeks, we should see some improvement,” Trujillo says. If the plan doesn’t work, she reassesses and changes the strategy. On average, Trujillo says she interacts with about 70 students per day. Trujillo says teaching today is different than when she started 16 years ago. Now, the use of technology, tablets or Chromebooks, has become a go-to tool. Behavior has also changed. “They want the answer fast…they want immediate feedback,” Trujillo says. She adds that kids don’t interact with each other as much as they did when she started working. “There’s a real lack of oral language development,” she adds. Since the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) began in the mid-1970s, the number of students enrolled in special ed has grown; however, federal funding to support it is not enough. “The state and federal government don’t provide enough funding for special education,” Diffenbaugh says, noting MPUSD only receives 14 percent from the federal government instead of the 40 percent of the costs per student promised by IDEA. Special ed provides free, tailored education for 3- to 21-year-olds. The number of special ed students enrolled in Monterey County has climbed from 9,628 in 2020-2021 to 11,472 in the 2024-2025 school year. At Alisal Union, which has a student population of 7,500, roughly 1,100 pupils have an Individualized Education Program, a plan developed for special education students based on their specific needs. Satwat Rais, director of special education at Alisal Union School District, says awareness and better testing are two contributing factors in the increase of students enrolled in special education. “More and more parents want their children evaluated, which is slightly different from what happened 20 years ago,” Rais says. “The awareness is there. The support is here.” Another variable impacting school districts’ revenue is declining enrollment. While districts can’t reverse this demographic trend—there are aging populations and fewer school-age children—they can take measures to retain more students by being rigorous when approving interdistrict transfers (allowing children to attend schools in other districts). At SCESD, the administration decided they would only authorize transfers based on four reasons according to California education code, including children of parents in the military; being bullied or expelled; or attending school in the area the parent works. Esteban Hernandez, SCESD’s executive director of pupil personnel services, says that up to 300 students who live in district boundaries transfer to other school districts every year. “We are hoping to cut that number at least in half,” Hernandez says. Washington Union is a unique district in Monterey County. Nearly 44 percent, or 327 students, of its current student population are interdistrict transfers. (WUSD has decided to phase out its interdistrict transfer program, shrink its student population and switch from being a state-funded to a community-funded district.) The new model for Washington Union will mean fewer students, but also more money per child. During the 2024-2025 school year, the district spent $11,364 per pupil, the lowest in the county; with the new funding method, its spending would be similar to districts in South County, about $15,600. Uccelli says it will take the district about three years to fully transition into a property tax-funded district. District administrators say birth rates, high cost of living (pushing young families to move away) and interdistrict transfers are all impacting their student population. “We’re losing revenue year after year,” Diffenbaugh says, noting the district has 50-70 fewer students every year. (Since a transitional kindergarten expansion that started in the 2022–2023 school year, declining enrollment has slowed down.) According to the Public Policy Institute of California, California overall has experienced declining enrollment for eight consecutive years. During the 2024-2025 school year, enrollment fell in 57 percent of districts. New data from the state shows that the education system lost 75,000 students in the 2025-26 school year. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, enrollment will continue to drop in the upcoming years. In recent years in Monterey County, MPUSD closed three schools— Highland and Foothill elementary schools in 2022 and Colton Middle School in 2023—as a result of its declining enrollment. Pajaro Valley Unified is currently exploring school closures to address declining enrollment and a shrinking budget. Adamson says school districts are in transition and she expects they will stabilize overtime. “Districts are recalibrating and working toward more sustainable, long-term planning,” she says. “The focus remains on protecting the core of what matters most—student learning, well-being and strong school communities. This moment is pushing us to think more strategically about how we use resources and how we design systems that are both effective and sustainable.” Source: Monterey County Office of Education, as of February of 2026. BUDGET BREAKDOWN SCHOOL DISTRICT PROJECTED REVENUES PROJECTED EXPENSES PROJECTED DEFICIT/SURPLUS Alisal Union $142,940,196 $183,431,144 -$40,490,948 Carmel Unified $88,246,318 $87,450,026 $796,292 Monterey Peninsula Unified $176,912,159 $190,618,715 -$13,706,556 Pacific Grove Unified $47,858,802 $48,896,338 -$1,037,536 Salinas City Elementary $154,538,448 $148,506,826 $6,031,622 Salinas Union High $344,715,196 $374,491,309 -$29,776,113 Of Monterey County’s 24 school districts, 20 are projecting a deficit for 2025-26. This small selection shows a few districts’ adopted budgets for the year. The total deficits across all 24 Monterey County districts is $107.4 million; this does not include Pajaro Valley Unified, which is located mostly in Santa Cruz County but also serves North Monterey County students, and is projecting a $29.3 million deficit.
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