Dallas County
Alabama's Black Belt: Where Chronic Absenteeism Is Twice the State Average
Across a crescent of rural counties stretching from southwestern Alabama to the state's eastern border, students miss school at nearly twice the rate of their peers statewide.
The Black Belt Split: Same Region, Opposite Trajectories
The Alabama Black Belt (the crescent of historically impoverished, majority-Black rural counties stretching from Sumter to Macon) is supposed to move as one. Same demographics. Same poverty. Same dist...
Alabama Is 32,000 Students Below Its Pre-COVID Trajectory
Alabama's public schools enrolled 740,118 students in 2019-20. That was roughly where they had been for half a decade: fluctuating within a narrow band, never gaining or losing more than a percentage ...
Eleven Rural Alabama Districts Have Lost 40% of Their Students Since 2015
Perry County enrolled 1,730 students in 2015. This year it enrolls 731. That is not a typo. The district has lost 57.7% of its students in 11 years, a rate of decline so steep that it amounts to losin...
28 Alabama Districts Have Recovered to Pre-COVID Enrollment. Four in Five Have Not
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 through 2025-26, just 28 have retur...