Macon 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...
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...
Nine Alabama Districts Haven't Grown in Over a Decade
Perry County enrolled 731 students in 2025-26. Eleven years ago, it enrolled 1,730. Not once in the intervening years did enrollment rise, not by a single student, not for a single year.
714,363: Alabama Hits Its Lowest Enrollment in Over a Decade
State Superintendent Eric Mackey put it plainly in October: "They're just gone." He was talking about roughly 2,100 students who were enrolled in Alabama public schools last year and simply did not re...