In this series: Alabama 2025-26 Enrollment.

A year ago, Alabama's enrollment story had a silver lining. The state had lost students, yes, but the pace seemed to be slowing. The 2024-25 count of 717,473 was down from the prior year, though not by as much as the COVID-era drops. Some districts posted small gains. Huntsville held steady. State Superintendent Eric Mackey acknowledged the headwinds — birth rates, school choice, immigration — but the prevailing mood was that Alabama had found something close to a floor.

Then the Alabama State Department of Education posted its 2025-26 enrollment figures, and the floor gave way: 714,363 public school students, down 3,110 from the prior year. That extends a four-year decline streak to 21,445 lost students since the 2021-22 peak of 735,808. At the current pace, the state will fall below 700,000 before the decade ends. Whatever floor people thought they saw last year was not a floor.

What the numbers open up

The enrollment data covers 155 districts, from Huntsville's defense-driven suburbs to Black Belt counties where half the students have disappeared in a decade. Over the coming weeks, The ALEdTribune will unpack it in a series of data-driven articles. Here is what jumps out first.

Alabama just hit its lowest enrollment in 12 years of data. The 714,363 figure is not just lower than last year — it is the lowest point since at least 2014-15, when the state enrolled 732,698. The four-year decline of 21,445 students has erased a decade of modest growth, and the trajectory shows no sign of reversal.

White students dropped below 50% for the first time. In 2024-25, the white share of Alabama's public school enrollment fell to 49.97% — crossing below the majority line. Alabama is now a majority-minority state for public school enrollment, a demographic milestone a generation in the making.

Only one in five districts recovered from COVID. Of 135 districts with consistent data, just 29 have returned to their pre-pandemic enrollment levels. The other 106 are still below where they were in 2019-20, and most are falling further behind each year.

By the numbers: 714,363 students statewide in 2025-26 — down 21,445 from the 2021-22 peak, a 2.9% decline across four years and the lowest enrollment in over a decade of state data.

The threads we are following

The Black Belt is emptying out. Perry County has lost 57.7% of its students since 2014-15. Sumter County has lost 52.4%. Nine districts have declined every single year for 11 consecutive years — the full span of available data — and six of them are Black Belt counties where out-migration has hollowed communities to the bone.

English learners quadrupled in a decade. LEP enrollment surged from 1.9% to 7.1% of students between 2015 and 2025, driven largely by Hispanic immigration into north Alabama's poultry processing corridor. One in every 14 Alabama students is now classified as an English learner. Whether that growth has peaked — given federal immigration enforcement — is one of the open questions.

Mobile County has lost one in five students. The state's largest coastal district shed 12,726 students over the past decade, a 20.2% decline that outpaces the state average by a wide margin. Meanwhile, Huntsville City stands as essentially the only large district not in freefall.

What comes next

This is the first in a series of articles examining what the 2025-26 enrollment data reveals about Alabama public schools. New articles publish weekly on Tuesdays.

The enrollment figures come from the ALSDE Reports & Data. The data covers headcount enrollment for public school districts statewide.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.