More Than 1.2 Million Students Left Public Schools Since Pandemic: Report

While students across the country welcome the coming of summer, many public schools face the harsh reality that student enrollment has sharply declined and doesn’t appear to be returning to pre-pandemic numbers. Some schools are even reaching a financial crisis point.

According to a recent national survey tracking such numbers since 2020, public schools in the U.S. have lost more than 1.2 million students. There are around 50 million students in the public school system across the country, so that’s about a 2% drop.

This is everywhere, but if anything, the trend is concentrated in major urban areas. For example, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s noncharter schools saw around 43,000 students leave over the past two academic years, and enrollment in Chicago schools has dropped by about 25,000 in that same time.

Over the past two years, New York City has seen around 50,000 students leave the public school system.

However, cities aren’t the only places grappling with this. One district in Olathe, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City, had more than 1,000 of its students leave in 2020, out of around 33,000. Perhaps even more interesting is that only around half of them returned for this school year.

Rural areas are also seeing this trend. For example, in Woodbury County, Iowa, student enrollment in the Westwood Community School District declined by more than 5% during the last two years. It dropped even though the superintendent, Jay Lutt, pointed out that the community saw an influx of new residents coming from larger cities during the pandemic.

In Michigan, enrollment is still more than 50,000 lower than numbers from before the pandemic.

This is also being seen in other areas like Orange County, California, which has historically been a destination for desirable public schools. Still, enrollment went down for the second year in a row. Across California,