When schools began the fall semester of 2020 – six months after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic – many of them reported a significant decline in student enrollment.

Federal education data shows that public school enrollment dropped 3% compared to the previous year. That means roughly 1.5 million students exited the U.S. public education system.

To better understand these enrollment declines, we analyzed school enrollment records for every student in the state of Michigan. This deep dive focused not only on how the pandemic affected the number of kids enrolled in public schools – both traditional and charter – but also whether families decided to home-school or enroll in private school. We compared these student-level records from Michigan with national data from the Household Pulse Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2020 and 2021.

Our research uncovered four major trends in school enrollment during the first year of the pandemic.


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1. Kindergarten experienced a big drop

In Michigan, overall public school enrollment decreased by 3% in the fall of 2020. The largest decline was in kindergarten, where enrollment dropped 10%. The national data follow a similar pattern, showing a 3% drop in overall enrollment and a 9% drop among kindergartners.

These enrollment drops are a big deal for several reasons.

For starters, if the families who pulled their kids out of public schools during the pandemic never come back, it means fewer students and less money for public schools.

Full story at The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/4-trends-in-public-school-enrollment-due-to-covid-19-168911

Image Credits: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/kindergarten-student-natalia-bayoumi-holds-the-hand-of-her-news-photo/1234722046