Dallas County - EdTribune AL - Alabama Education Data

Alabama Is 32,000 Students Below Its Pre-COVID Trajectory

Wed, 06 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

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 point in any direction. A linear projection through the 2015-2019 data produces a nearly flat trajectory, essentially forecasting enrollment would hold steady around 740,000.

If that trajectory had continued through the pandemic and beyond, Alabama would have 746,099 students in 2025-26. Instead it has 714,363. The gap between where Alabama was headed and where it actually landed is 31,736 students, and it has widened in five of the seven post-pandemic years.

A gap that only runs one direction

The divergence started small. In 2019-20, the gap between actual and projected enrollment was just 3,070 students. COVID blew it open: by 2020-21, the gap had quadrupled to 13,887. The 2021-22 school year brought a partial rebound, narrowing the gap to 8,350 as families returned to classrooms.

That was the last good news.

Since 2022, the gap has widened relentlessly. It jumped to 14,854 in 2022-23, then nearly doubled to 26,412 in 2023-24. By 2025-26 it had reached 31,736, or 4.3% below the projected trajectory. Each year Alabama falls further behind the line it was on before the pandemic arrived.

The year-over-year enrollment changes tell the same story from a different angle. After losing 10,332 students during the pandemic's first year, Alabama clawed back 6,022 in 2021-22. It has lost students in every year since. The 2023-24 loss of 11,073 was the largest single-year decline in the dataset, exceeding even the COVID year itself. The losses in 2024-25 (-1,243) and 2025-26 (-3,110) were smaller in absolute terms, but they came on top of a base that was already deeply eroded.

Alabama is now in a four-year decline streak, with enrollment at its lowest point in the 12-year dataset: 714,363. That is 35,534 fewer students than the 2015-16 peak of 749,897, a 4.7% decline.

Five districts account for most of the damage

The losses are not evenly distributed. Of 141 districts with data spanning 2020 to 2026, 110 lost enrollment, or 78%. But five districts account for 73.1% of the total state loss of 25,755 students since 2019-20.

Mobile County leads: 7,314 students lost since 2019-20, a 13.5% decline. Birmingham City lost 3,665 (16.0%). Montgomery County lost 3,516 (12.4%). Jefferson County lost 3,254 (8.9%). Shelby County rounds out the top five at 1,074 (5.1%).

The concentration of losses in Alabama's largest urban and suburban systems reflects a pattern visible across the South: big-district families have more exit options, whether private schools, charter schools, homeschooling, or migration to smaller systems nearby. Dallas County, with 2,032 students remaining, has lost 29.3% of its enrollment since 2019-20, the steepest percentage decline among the top losers.

Where the students went

Three forces are pulling students out of Alabama's public schools, and they are difficult to untangle.

The CHOOSE Act, Alabama's education savings account program, launched in the 2025-26 school year. Of roughly 24,000 students awarded ESA funds, approximately 3,032 had previously attended public schools. That accounts for roughly half of the 2025-26 decline but only a small fraction of the cumulative 31,736 trajectory gap. Most CHOOSE Act recipients, about two-thirds, were already in private schools or homeschool programs before the program existed.

A second, murkier factor is the disappearance of students whose families appear to have left the state or withdrawn from formal schooling without notifying their districts. State Superintendent Eric Mackey told WSFA that of the 5,800 students who did not return in 2025-26, roughly half enrolled in private schools or homeschooling. The other half remains unaccounted for.

"We do believe that there is a group of students out there that may be homeschooling, but have not been accounted for because they haven't actually gone to their local school board and withdrawn and indicated that as their preference." -- State Superintendent Eric Mackey, WSFA, Oct. 2025

Superintendents across the state have reported that many of the unaccounted students are Hispanic. A new federal reporting form that allows students to select multiple racial identities has made it harder to parse what portion of the apparent Hispanic enrollment decline reflects actual departures versus reclassification. PARCA's analysis found reported Hispanic enrollment fell from 12% to 4% of students between 2024-25 and 2025-26, a drop of 56,196 students on paper. But the "two or more races" category surged by 52,627 students over the same period, absorbing most of the apparent decline. Alabama actually gained about 300 Hispanic students in net terms, according to the final count.

The third factor is demographic. Alabama's birth rates fell starting with the 2008 recession and never recovered. Deaths have outnumbered births for three consecutive years. Smaller kindergarten cohorts have been feeding into the pipeline for over a decade, and there is no rebound on the horizon.

Beyond recovery

The language of "COVID recovery" implies a return to normal. Alabama's data suggests the pandemic was not a disruption but a permanent break.

The state lost 10,332 students during COVID (2019-20 to 2020-21). In the five years since, it has not recovered a single one. Instead, it has lost an additional 15,423 students beyond the COVID low of 729,786. The recovery rate is not low. It is negative: -149%.

Put differently, the COVID drop was 10,332 students. The post-COVID decline has been roughly one and a half times larger.

The expected budget impact is approximately $30 million in reduced allocations for fiscal year 2027, with an estimated 500 education positions affected statewide. Alabama's new RAISE Act funding formula, which sets a base of $7,547 per student for 2025-26, means each student who leaves takes that funding with them.

What happens next

The CHOOSE Act is set to expand. Governor Ivey signed an amended budget that nearly doubled the program's initial funding from $100 million to $180 million in its first year, and legislators are considering making it universal. If more public school students take ESA funds in year two and beyond, the trajectory gap will widen further.

But the CHOOSE Act is a recent addition to a longer story. Alabama was losing students well before the voucher program existed. The 2023-24 loss of 11,073 students, the largest in the dataset, happened a full year before the first ESA dollar was spent. The underlying forces pulling enrollment down, declining births, outmigration, and a growing preference for alternatives to traditional public schools, were at work before the pandemic and have accelerated since.

The question for Alabama's 155 school districts is not when enrollment will return to pre-COVID levels. It is how to operate a system built for 740,000 students when fewer than 715,000 show up, and fewer arrive each year.

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

Eleven Rural Alabama Districts Have Lost 40% of Their Students Since 2015

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

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 losing one classroom every few months with no prospect of the seats filling back up.

Perry County is not an outlier. It is the sharpest edge of a pattern running through Alabama's historic Black Belt, the crescent of rural counties stretching from the state's southwestern corner through its midsection. Across these 11 districts, combined enrollment has fallen from 22,931 to 13,623, a loss of 9,308 students and a 40.6% decline. The state as a whole lost 2.4% over the same period.

The arithmetic of disappearance

Six of these 11 districts have maintained unbroken decline streaks for the full 11-year span of available data. Lowndes County, Macon County, Selma City, Sumter County, and Wilcox County have each declined every single year since 2015 alongside Perry County. Not one year of recovery. Not one year of holding steady.

The losses are not evenly distributed. Perry County's 57.7% decline leads, followed by Sumter County at 52.4%, Wilcox County at 45.9%, Selma City at 44.3%, and Lowndes County at 44.0%. Even the least-affected districts in this group, Hale County and Macon County, have lost more than a quarter of their students.

Five of these 11 districts now enroll fewer than 1,000 students. Barbour County has 537. Perry County has 731. Sumter County and Greene County each hover just above 800. The median district in this group enrolls 1,007 students, roughly the size of a single large elementary school.

A region emptying from both ends

The enrollment collapse tracks a broader demographic unraveling. Nine of the 10 Alabama counties with the biggest population losses in the 2010s were in the Black Belt. Dallas County, where Selma is located, lost a net 5,000 residents between 2010 and 2020. Perry County's population fell 20% over the same decade, and its median age climbed from 35 to 39.

The mechanism is straightforward: working-age adults leave, and the population that remains skews older and poorer.

"They are positively selected out of the population. They already have higher education, or a skill set that allows them to be mobile." Nyesha Black, University of Alabama demographics director, BirminghamWatch, Jan. 2024

Kenneth Johnson, a sociologist at the University of New Hampshire's Carsey School, put it more bluntly: "The school systems will have to contract because there aren't children anymore to staff all the schools."

The out-migration is not a new phenomenon. But the enrollment data shows it accelerating. These 11 districts lost 824 students in 2016, 847 in 2018, then 1,211 in 2019. The 2024 loss of 1,202 students was nearly as large. The region has not had a single year of losses below 500 students in the entire data window.

Where the funding formula fails

Alabama's Foundation Program, the state's school funding formula, allocates teacher units based on student headcount: fewer students means fewer units, which means fewer teachers and less money. The formula has been in place for three decades and contains no meaningful weight for poverty, rurality, or the fixed costs of operating a school building regardless of enrollment.

For these districts, where 80% to 92% of students are economically disadvantaged, the formula creates a compounding problem. As students leave, funding shrinks. As funding shrinks, the district can offer fewer programs. As programs disappear, more families leave. Selma City's economically disadvantaged rate stands at 92.4%. Wilcox County: 91.9%. Perry County: 91.0%. Lowndes County: 89.7%. These rates are partly inflated by Community Eligibility Provision, which allows high-poverty districts to classify all students as economically disadvantaged for federal meal programs. But even accounting for that, the underlying poverty in these counties is severe. Perry County's census poverty rate is 35.4%, roughly triple the national average. The funding formula treats these districts almost identically to affluent suburban systems.

Lawmakers are now considering a weighted student funding model that would add funding based on poverty levels, disability categories, English learner status, and rural location. The proposed formulas would cost an additional $713 million to $825 million over five years. Legislative action is targeted for the 2026 session.

The state is already stepping in

Two of these districts are currently under state intervention. The Alabama State Board of Education took over Sumter County Schools in August 2023, when the district had roughly 990 students. The state is now consolidating all four Sumter County schools onto a single campus, a $14 million construction project. Dallas County Schools followed in March 2025, becoming the third district under state control alongside Sumter and Bessemer City. A state audit had flagged $4.9 million in improperly bid services, and only one-third of students were proficient in English language arts.

Dallas County has lost 38.6% of its enrollment since 2015, falling from 3,312 to 2,032 students. The state intervention is expected to last about two years.

The gap keeps widening

The indexed comparison between these 11 districts' combined enrollment and statewide enrollment illustrates the divergence. Alabama as a whole has held relatively stable, hovering between 97% and 102% of its 2015 baseline over the past decade. The 11-district group has fallen in a nearly straight line to 59.4% of its 2015 enrollment. The gap between the two trajectories widened every single year.

These 11 districts now account for 1.9% of Alabama's total enrollment, down from 3.1% in 2015. Their share has been cut by more than a third. Yet the 9,308 students they lost represent 53.0% of the state's total enrollment decline over that period. More than half of Alabama's net student losses since 2015 have come from a cluster of districts that together enroll fewer students than Huntsville City alone.

What happens next

The CHOOSE Act, Alabama's new voucher-like program, awarded over 23,000 education savings accounts for the 2025-26 school year, totaling more than $124 million. Most recipients were already enrolled in private or homeschool settings, which limits the direct enrollment impact on public schools. But in districts where the nearest private school is 40 miles away, the program offers little practical alternative. It is the districts with the most options that benefit; the ones with the fewest options that pay.

The question for these districts is not whether enrollment will continue to fall. Barring an economic reversal in counties that have been losing population for decades, it will. The question is at what enrollment level a district can no longer function as a district. Barbour County at 537 students is approaching that threshold. Perry County at 731, after losing nearly 1,000 students in 11 years, may cross it before the proposed funding formula reform reaches the legislature. The funding formula, if reformed, would arrive after the damage.

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.