One in 14 Alabama Students Is Now an English Learner

Wed, 13 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In Tarrant City, a district of 1,221 students wedged between Birmingham and its northern suburbs, more than one in three students is classified as an English learner. A decade ago, it was one in 25. Tarrant is not an outlier. It is the leading edge of the fastest-growing student population in Alabama public schools.

Since 2014-15, the number of English learners in Alabama has grown from 13,793 to 51,068, a 270% increase that has reshaped staffing, budgets, and instructional models in districts that were not built for multilingual education. Over the same period, total enrollment fell by 14,450 students. The two trends are moving in opposite directions, and the gap is widening.

The steepest curve in the state

English learner enrollment has grown every year since 2014-15, adding an average of 3,728 students per year. The share of the student body classified as EL has risen from 1.9% to 7.1%, more than tripling in relative terms even as the denominator shrank.

The growth has not been steady. The year-over-year pace tells a more complex story: a large jump of 7,037 students in 2015-16, a near-plateau in 2016-17 (just 136 newly identified as English learners), then a sustained acceleration from 2017-18 onward. The largest gain since that initial jump came in 2023-24, when 6,408 students were added to EL rolls. In 2024-25, the pace slowed to 3,230, though the absolute count still reached a new high.

The 2015-16 jump deserves a caveat. A single-year increase of 51% likely reflects expanded identification and reporting protocols rather than actual new arrivals of that magnitude. Alabama adopted new EL screening procedures aligned with federal guidance during this period. The growth from 2017 onward, by contrast, has been far more consistent and tracks closely with Hispanic enrollment trends in the state, which rose from 7.0% of the student body in 2015-16 to 12.2% in 2024-25. The two categories overlap heavily: most English learners in Alabama are Spanish-speaking, and many are children of families drawn to the state's food processing industry.

The poultry corridor

The geographic concentration is pronounced. Eight districts now have EL shares above 20%, and all but one sit along a corridor of poultry processing and meatpacking operations stretching across northeast Alabama.

Albertville City leads the large-district list at 37.7% EL, with 2,086 English learners in a system of about 5,500 students. Russellville City, in Franklin County, has climbed from 4.9% to 35.9% in a decade, one of the steepest trajectories in the state. Fort Payne City, the seat of DeKalb County, stands at 22.9%. DeKalb County itself, the surrounding district, is at 22.1%.

Albertville Superintendent Bart Reeves has described the staffing challenge in direct terms.

"We do have some translators, but certainly not the number we need. So that's challenging." -- Alabama Daily News, Aug. 2024

The link between EL enrollment and the food processing industry is not incidental. Albertville's student body is roughly 60% Hispanic, according to Reeves, drawn by decades of recruitment into the region's poultry plants. Marshall County (16.9% EL) and Franklin County (13.5% EL) follow the same pattern.

Beyond the corridor

The highest-concentration districts are in the northeast, but the largest absolute gains have occurred in Alabama's urban centers. Montgomery County added 2,705 English learners since 2014-15, going from 450 (1.5% of enrollment) to 3,155 (12.4%). Jefferson County added 2,178, Birmingham City added 1,757, and Mobile County added 1,752. In all four, total enrollment declined while EL counts surged.

The two trends create a structural mismatch. Districts are simultaneously losing base enrollment (and the per-pupil funding it carries) while absorbing students whose instructional programs carry higher costs. EL instruction typically requires dedicated staff, specialized materials, and translation services that general-fund formulas were not designed to cover.

Lanett City, a small district on the Georgia border, is a case study in rapid transformation. It reported 45 English learners (5.0%) in 2015-16. By 2024-25, 280 of its 959 students, 29.2%, are English learners. Lanett's total enrollment has fallen over the same period, meaning EL growth is not a function of the district expanding. New families are arriving as others leave.

Twenty-eight Alabama districts now have EL shares above 10%, up from a handful a decade ago. Decatur City (23.3%), Boaz City (22.2%), and Jasper City (15.1%) round out the high-concentration districts.

The funding question

Until 2025, Alabama allocated roughly $488 per EL student in state funds, with an additional $89 per student from the federal government. For a district like Albertville, that translated to just over $1 million for a population that constitutes more than a third of its student body and needs dedicated instruction, assessment, and family communication in multiple languages.

The RAISE Act, signed by Governor Ivey in May 2025, restructures Alabama's funding formula to weight student needs. English learners receive a 7% weight on the base funding factor of $7,547 per pupil, which translates to roughly $528 per EL student. Districts where EL students exceed 9% of enrollment receive a 10% weight, or about $754 per student. The first-year allocation for EL programs totals $33.5 million statewide.

For DeKalb County Schools, the RAISE Act means an additional $1.4 million in its fiscal year 2026 budget. Anna Hairston, the district's director of federal programs, told the Alabama Reflector the system has already hired two ELL teachers with the new funding, with four more positions in the hiring process. The question is scale: 51,068 EL students at $528-$754 each still falls well short of what districts like Russellville spend per EL student on instruction, assessment, and support services.

The Hechinger Report documented the staffing challenge in Russellville in 2022, noting the district employed roughly 20 EL educators, aides, and translators, nearly half funded through temporary COVID-19 relief money.

"We were trying to teach an increasing number of EL students with predominantly white teachers that speak English." -- Heath Grimes, Russellville Superintendent, The Hechinger Report, Oct. 2022

A share that grew while enrollment shrank

The rising EL share is partly a denominator effect. Total statewide enrollment dropped by 14,450 students (2.0%) from 2014-15 to 2024-25, while EL enrollment added 37,275. Even if total enrollment had held flat, English learners would have grown from 1.9% to 6.9% of the student body. The shrinking denominator pushed the share to 7.1%.

Thirty-nine districts saw both a rise in EL enrollment and a decline in total headcount. In Montgomery County, EL enrollment grew by 2,705 while total enrollment fell by 4,707. In Birmingham City, EL enrollment grew by 1,757 while total enrollment fell by 4,844. These districts are not simply gaining students. Their student bodies are being recomposed.

The data cannot distinguish between these sources of growth. A rising EL count could reflect new students enrolling for the first time, existing students being newly identified through improved screening, or some combination. The 2015-16 spike (7,037 additional English learners in a single year) almost certainly includes a large identification component. The sustained growth from 2017 onward is more plausibly driven by actual new arrivals, given its alignment with Hispanic enrollment growth and regional economic data, though districts that expanded screening capacity would also show identification-driven increases.

What 2025-26 may change

The 2025-26 school year introduced a new variable. State Superintendent Eric Mackey reported in October 2025 that approximately 5,000 students did not return to Alabama's public schools, the largest single-year drop in four decades. Of those, roughly 3,000 took advantage of Alabama's new CHOOSE Act education savings accounts.

The remaining 2,100, Mackey said, simply vanished from the rolls.

"They're just gone. They didn't transfer to private school, they didn't go to home school, they didn't go to school in another state." -- WBRC, Oct. 2025

Mackey noted that superintendents across the state have told him "a lot" of the missing students are Hispanic, though schools are prohibited by federal law from asking about immigration status. The timing coincides with intensified federal immigration enforcement in Alabama.

The 2024-25 data in this analysis predates those disappearances. Whether the decade-long EL growth trajectory bends, stalls, or reverses in 2025-26 will depend on the interplay of continued immigration into the poultry corridor, enforcement-driven departures, the CHOOSE Act's impact on EL families, and district capacity to identify and serve new arrivals. The data for 2025-26, when it becomes available, will be the first real test of whether Alabama's EL growth is decelerating or was simply paused.

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