Short-term cost-cutting measure, perhaps? It looks like it was effective this school year, which probably cut the kindergarten budget by 25%, right off the bat. (I'm not in CA, so I'm just assuming that they went from Dec 1 to Sep 1, which would, at one stroke, eliminate three months worth of birthdays from the 2014-2015 kindergarten class.)

...pronounced like the long vowel and first letter of the alphabet...