This reporting builds on NPR's reporting from 2020, which documented enrollment drops at a similar sample of districts across the country. Our sample is neither comprehensive nor necessarily representative, but it is large enough to suggest some important patterns. School leaders hoped this year would bring recovery. Many families simply opted out of remote learning in the non-compulsory grades of pre-K and kindergarten. The decline was attributed largely to COVID-related disruptions, and was concentrated in the early grades. In 2019-2020, public school enrollment dropped by 3 percent nationwide, erasing a decade of slow gains. What happened during COVID, we just saw an increase in the number that didn't come." "Pre-pandemic, we were already seeing enrollment decline. across the country, there's a lot of concern right now," says Chicago schools chief Pedro Martinez. In the Chicago public schools, enrollment dropped by 14,000 last year, and another 10,000 this year. In Los Angeles, the student population declined by 17,000 students last school year, and nearly 9,000 this year. New York City's school enrollment dropped by about 38,000 students last school year and another 13,000 this year. This is particularly true in some of the nation's largest systems: Most are now posting a second straight year of declines. We found that very few districts, especially larger ones, have returned to pre-pandemic numbers.
We compiled the latest headcount data directly from more than 600 districts in 23 states and Washington, D.C., including statewide data from Massachusetts, Georgia and Alabama. The troubling enrollment losses that school districts reported last year have in many places continued this fall, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt public education across the country, an NPR investigation has found.
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