Each day at the Ojai learning center Rock Tree Sky begins with a link to a digital menu of activities for students to choose from.
Scattered across the nonprofit center’s campus — housed at the former Summit Elementary School — are a greenhouse, a star observatory, a makerspace, an outdoor kitchen and a hut for mushroom growing.
The heavily self-directed learning ethos the center embraces is unique, hailed in some circles as an ideal future for education. In Ojai, it’s drawing students by the dozens and helping Ojai Unified School District claw back some lost enrollment via a previously untapped demographic of student: homeschoolers.
Enrollment has been on a steep decline across California’s public K-12 schools since 2017 as the state’s population ages and shrinks. Private school enrollment has bumped up marginally in that period, according to state data. The California Department of Education does not keep an exact record of home school enrollment.
Ojai Unified has been particularly hard hit, losing just under 300 students, or 11% of enrollment, in the same period. Last year, the district closed a pair of schools and laid off the equivalent of 40 staff in an effort to balance a budget eaten away by the loss of enrollment-tied funding.