Cinamon Watson retweetledi
At @CSInstituteAZ, we’ve been tracking the decline in public district school enrollment for a while, and reporting on the impact it’s had and the need to close district schools.
But something is happening this school year that even we did not anticipate, and that I have seen almost no media reporting about: district enrollment in Arizona dropped by almost 30,000 students this school year.
This is according to figures published by the Department of Education in January, and these numbers can change. If they hold this would be the largest drop in K-12 District enrollment since the pandemic, when the state lost 50,000 district students.
Charter school enrollment has been basically flat for the last few years. So what is growing? The state’s ESA program, which grew by almost 17,000 students this school year. Meaning the remaining drop likely comes from changing demographics, again something @CSInstituteAZ and @GlennFarley14 have been warning about for some time.
There are now about 825,000 kids in Arizona’s district classrooms. That’s an all-time low and lower than 2020-2021, during the peak of the pandemic. At its all-time high in 2009, there were 927,000 kids in district classrooms.
According to CSI’s research, district schools have enough capacity for an additional 600,000 students in unused, taxpayer funded buildings, while total enrollment in district schools continues to decline – now even faster than our experts predicted.
English
