Chickasaw City - EdTribune AL - Alabama Education Data

Half of Limestone County's Students Are Virtual

Wed, 27 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Limestone County reports 16,633 students in 2025-26, nearly double its enrollment from a decade ago. On paper, it is one of only two Alabama districts with an 11-year unbroken growth streak. But 8,307 of those students have never set foot in a Limestone County school. They attend Alabama Connections Academy, a statewide virtual school operated by Pearson that happens to be administratively housed in the district. Strip out the virtual enrollment, and Limestone County's traditional schools serve 8,326 students, a number that has actually declined by 342 since 2014-15.

The same pattern repeats in two other districts. Eufaula City reports 8,619 students, up 213.0% since 2014-15. Three-quarters of them are virtual. Chickasaw City reports 3,387, up 263.0%. More than 70% are virtual. Alabama's three fastest-growing districts by percentage are, in reality, administrative hosts for statewide virtual schools run by two publicly traded corporations.

The 17,203-student question

Alabama's three statewide virtual schools collectively enrolled 17,203 students in 2025-26, representing 2.4% of the state's 714,363 total enrollment. That figure has grown sixfold since 2018-19, when only Alabama Virtual Academy at Eufaula reported statewide virtual enrollment of 2,832.

The growth accelerated after COVID-19 normalized remote instruction. Alabama Connections Academy, a Pearson-operated program, first appears in the state enrollment data in 2020-21 with 4,451 students and reached 8,307 in 2025-26. Alabama Virtual Academy, operated by Stride (formerly K12 Inc.), grew from 2,832 students in 2018-19 to 6,499 in 2025-26. Alabama Destinations Career Academy, also a Stride school, first appears in the data in 2021-22 with 1,644 students and has grown to 2,397.

These students attend school from anywhere in Alabama. But because each virtual school is chartered under a local district, the enrollment counts as that district's headcount for state reporting purposes. The result: three small districts carry enrollment figures that bear little relationship to their actual brick-and-mortar student populations.

Who's behind the growth

Both operators are subsidiaries of publicly traded companies. Alabama Connections Academy is a division of Connections Education LLC, part of Pearson, the British education conglomerate. Alabama Virtual Academy and Alabama Destinations Career Academy are programs of Stride Inc., which reported $2.41 billion in revenue for fiscal 2025, a 17.9% increase over the prior year. Stride's Alabama Virtual Academy has seen a 50% enrollment increase over five years, a pace the company characterizes as evidence that families view virtual learning as a "preferred, long-term path."

The virtual charter sector nationally is projected to grow from $5.76 billion in 2025 to $14.41 billion by 2032, a 14% compound annual growth rate. Alabama is one of the states where that growth is most visible.

What the traditional numbers show

The gap between reported and actual enrollment is stark. Limestone County's reported total grew by 7,965 students since 2014-15. Its traditional enrollment fell by 342. Eufaula City's reported total grew by 5,865. Its traditional enrollment fell by 634. Only Chickasaw City saw any traditional growth at all: 57 students over 12 years.

For Limestone County's 14 traditional schools, enrollment peaked at 8,911 in 2016-17 and has drifted downward since, reaching 8,326 in 2025-26. The trajectory is indistinguishable from many rural Alabama counties. Eufaula City's four brick-and-mortar schools serve 2,120 students, down 23.0% from the 2,754 enrolled before the virtual school arrived. Chickasaw City's four traditional schools serve 990 students, roughly where they were a decade ago.

Statewide, 43 of 135 districts that operated in both 2014-15 and 2025-26 reported enrollment growth. After adjusting for virtual school enrollment, 41 still grew. The virtual distortion does not meaningfully change the statewide count of growing districts. It changes which districts top the list.

A performance gap

The academic question is whether these virtual schools deliver outcomes comparable to the traditional schools whose enrollment they inflate. Available performance data suggests they do not.

Alabama Connections Academy's math proficiency rate is 8%, compared to a state average of 30%. Its reading proficiency is 42%, versus a state average of 47%. The school ranks in the bottom 50% of all Alabama schools for overall test scores. Alabama Virtual Academy at Eufaula shows a similar pattern: 7% math proficiency and 38% reading proficiency.

These proficiency gaps are not unique to Alabama. National research on virtual schools has consistently found lower academic performance than brick-and-mortar counterparts. Whether that reflects the schools themselves, the student population they attract, or both, remains contested. Virtual schools often serve students who struggled in traditional settings, which makes direct comparison difficult.

The accountability question

The structural arrangement raises a tension that Alabama has debated before. The Alabama Association of School Boards warned in 2016 that statewide virtual schools would "pull students and funding from all over the state," circumventing local control protections established in 2015 legislation. The association argued that existing law required local school systems to maintain "protocol for participation, monitoring, test-taking and all of the supports and guidance that is critical for students to succeed."

"National data shows allowing statewide open-enrollment at virtual schools is a bad idea." -- Alabama Association of School Boards, 2016

That warning predated the current scale. In 2016, statewide virtual enrollment was negligible. Today, 17,203 students enroll through three virtual schools, all of them operated by for-profit companies and all of them housed in districts that contribute a fraction of the students they serve. The host districts receive state funding based on total enrollment, including virtual students, while the actual instruction is delivered by the corporate operator.

What comes next

Alabama's new RAISE Act, which takes effect in June 2025, will shift the state toward weighted student funding that allocates more resources for students in poverty, English learners, and students receiving special education services. How virtual students will be weighted under the new formula could reshape the incentive structure for host districts. If virtual students carry lower weights than the specialized populations they often serve, the financial calculus for hosting a statewide virtual school may change.

The more immediate question is whether enrollment data consumers, from state legislators to local school boards to researchers, understand that Alabama's top three growth districts are growth districts in name only. Limestone County's 11-year growth streak is real in the data. It is not real in the hallways.

Data source

Enrollment figures come from the Alabama State Department of Education, covering district and school-level totals for the 2014-15 through 2025-26 school years. Virtual enrollment is measured at the school level for the three statewide programs (Alabama Connections Academy, Alabama Virtual Academy at Eufaula City Schools, and Alabama Destinations Career Academy) and subtracted from each host district's reported total to estimate brick-and-mortar enrollment. Proficiency rates and operator revenue figures cited for context are attributed and linked inline; they are not part of the state enrollment dataset.

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

28 Alabama Districts Have Recovered to Pre-COVID Enrollment. Four in Five Have Not

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Five years after the pandemic emptied classrooms across Alabama, the students have not come back. Of 138 districts with comparable enrollment data from before COVID to today, just 28 have returned to their fall 2019 levels. That is a recovery rate of 20.3%.

The state as a whole has fared worse than any individual recovery statistic suggests. Alabama enrolled 740,118 K-12 students in the 2019-20 school year (the last pre-COVID fall count). By 2025-26, that figure had fallen to 714,363, a loss of 25,755 students, or 3.5%. The pandemic did not cause a temporary dip followed by a rebound. It marked the beginning of a sustained decline that has now lasted four consecutive years.

The false recovery of 2022

Alabama's year-over-year pattern tells a story of one brief reprieve surrounded by losses. After COVID drove enrollment down by 10,332 students in 2020-21, the state clawed back 6,022 in 2021-22. That single year accounts for the entirety of Alabama's post-pandemic recovery. Every year since has brought another decline: 6,019 lost in 2022-23, then 11,073 in 2023-24 (the largest single-year drop in the dataset), followed by 1,243 in 2024-25 and 3,110 in 2025-26.

The 2022 rebound, in other words, was not the start of recovery. It was an interruption in a downward slide.

Had pre-pandemic trends held, Alabama would have enrolled roughly 741,860 students in 2025-26 (based on the 2015-2020 linear trajectory). The actual count of 714,363 leaves the state 27,497 students below that projection, a gap that has widened every year since 2022.

Three cities, 14,495 missing students

The largest raw losses are concentrated in Alabama's urban cores. Mobile County has lost 7,314 students since its pre-COVID count, a 13.5% decline. Birmingham City is down 3,665 students (16.0%), and Montgomery County has lost 3,516 (12.4%). Together, these three districts account for 14,495 of the state's 25,755-student shortfall, or 56.3%.

Jefferson County, which surrounds Birmingham, lost another 3,254 students (8.9%), bringing the Big Four total to 17,749.

The losses extend deep into smaller systems. Dallas County has lost 29.3% of its enrollment since 2020. Selma City is down 25.5%. Walker County lost 1,042 students, a 14.0% decline. These are districts that were already operating on thin margins.

Where the students went

State Superintendent Eric Mackey offered a blunt accounting in October 2025. Of the 5,800 students Alabama's public schools lost that year, approximately 3,000 enrolled in private schools or homeschool programs using education savings accounts through the CHOOSE Act, the voucher-like program signed into law in March 2024. Another 2,100 students simply vanished from enrollment records.

"We know we have about 2,100 kids that were enrolled last year that have just disappeared. They're just gone." -- WBRC, Oct. 2025

Mackey reported that local superintendents identified a majority of the unaccounted students as Hispanic, though federal privacy law prohibits schools from inquiring about immigration status. The CHOOSE Act's first-year impact was more modest than its appropriation suggested: of approximately 24,000 ESA recipients, roughly 10,000 were already attending private schools, and another 9,000 were already homeschooled. Only about 3,000 transferred out of public schools, according to state data.

The CHOOSE Act's second year could have a larger effect. Lawmakers have discussed making the program universal despite tight Education Trust Fund budgets, which would open eligibility beyond the current income-tiered structure.

But the CHOOSE Act alone does not explain the scale of the post-COVID shortfall. The 25,755-student gap accumulated over five years. Birth rate declines, interstate migration, and a persistent post-pandemic shift toward homeschooling and private schooling all contributed. Alabama's natural population change turned negative in 2024, with deaths exceeding births by 2,200, a demographic headwind that enrollment data is only beginning to reflect.

The virtual school mirage

The three districts that appear to have staged the most impressive post-COVID recoveries are, on closer inspection, artifacts of virtual school enrollment that did not exist before the pandemic.

Limestone County grew from 11,030 to 16,633 students (50.8%), but nearly half of its current enrollment consists of Alabama Connections Academy students. Eufaula City surged from 5,367 to 8,619 (60.6%), with Alabama Virtual Academy accounting for roughly three-quarters of its headcount. Chickasaw City more than doubled, from 1,549 to 3,387 (118.7%), largely through Alabama Destinations Career Academy.

Remove these three districts and the recovery rate drops from 22.0% to 20.3%. The virtual enrollment these districts carry is real in the sense that students are receiving instruction, but it inflates the host district's numbers in ways that obscure the underlying trend. As Mackey told Alabama Daily News: "Virtual school is a good fit for some young people...but it's not for everybody."

The funding cliff behind the enrollment cliff

Enrollment decline does not just mean empty desks. Alabama's Foundation Program allocates teacher units based on student headcounts from the 20-day count following Labor Day. Fewer students means fewer units, which means fewer teachers funded by the state.

"Between 500-700 teacher jobs will disappear next year as we work on the next budget cycle." -- State Superintendent Eric Mackey, WBRC, Oct. 2025

More than half of Alabama's school districts faced teacher unit reductions in 2025-26. The cuts fell hardest on small and rural systems, particularly in the Black Belt. Selma City lost 10% of its teacher units (from 143 to 128). Sumter County dropped 9% (from 54 to 50). Linden City lost 9% (from 23 to 21). These are districts where state funding constitutes the overwhelming majority of operating budgets.

Recovery by district size

Medium-sized districts (5,000-10,000 students) have the lowest recovery rate at 16.0%, with only four of 25 returning to pre-COVID levels. Small districts (1,000-5,000) recovered at 19.8%, and large districts (10,000+) at 23.1%. The handful of micro districts under 1,000 students fared best at 33.3%, though the sample is small (three of nine).

Among the districts that did recover without virtual school inflation, several share a common profile: fast-growing suburban communities in the Tennessee Valley or the Auburn-Opelika corridor. Madison City gained 1,336 students (11.6%). Athens City added 1,101 (25.1%). These are places where new housing construction is pulling families from neighboring counties, not places where the pandemic's effects have been reversed.

Athens City has been building to keep pace. According to Superintendent Beth Patton, the district opened a new 260,000-square-foot high school in 2019, a new elementary campus in 2023, and expanded its intermediate school with eight classrooms and a gymnasium in 2025. A second new elementary school, Julian Newman Elementary, opened the same year with capacity for more than 700 students. The district is now searching for land to build yet another school. "We are excited about the future and believe the best is yet to come," Patton said.

What the next count will show

The 2026-27 school year will be the CHOOSE Act's second cycle. If the program goes universal as some lawmakers have proposed, the pull on public enrollment could accelerate. The 2,100 students who disappeared from rolls in 2025-26 without formal transfers represent a category that enrollment data cannot fully explain. Whether those families left the state, shifted to unreported homeschooling, or left the country, the seats they occupied will not be funded next year.

Alabama's four-year decline streak has now erased all of the 2016 enrollment spike and then some, pushing the state to its lowest K-12 headcount since before 2015. For superintendents in Mobile, Birmingham, and Montgomery, the question is no longer when recovery will arrive. It is how to operate school systems built for 25,000 more students than they serve.

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