Madison City - EdTribune AL - Alabama Education Data

One in Three Alabama Districts at All-Time Enrollment Lows

Wed, 20 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The four largest school districts in Alabama have never enrolled fewer students than they do right now. Mobile County, Jefferson County, Montgomery County, and Birmingham City all hit record lows in 2025-26, a distinction they share with 47 other districts across the state. In total, 51 of Alabama's 153 multi-year districts are at their lowest enrollment in at least 12 years of data. They collectively serve 255,066 students, more than a third of the state's public school population, and every one of them is shrinking.

The 51 districts at record lows enroll 35.7% of Alabama's students. The 24 districts at record highs enroll 10.1%. The arithmetic is stark: the declining districts are, on average, far larger than the growing ones.

The big four keep falling

Alabama's enrollment trajectory is a story that begins at the top. Mobile County, the state's largest district, peaked at 58,529 students in 2016 and has declined every year since, reaching 46,700 in 2025-26. That is a loss of 11,829 students, a 20.2% drop over a decade.

Birmingham City has lost even more proportionally: 24.5% since its 2016 peak, falling from 25,454 to 19,206. Montgomery County is down 19.9%, from 31,082 to 24,911. Jefferson County's decline is smaller at 9.2%, but at 33,204 students, it still lost 3,367 from its peak.

Combined, these four districts have shed 27,615 students since 2016. That is more than the entire current enrollment of Montgomery County.

The scale matters because Alabama's Foundation Program funding formula allocates teacher units based on student enrollment. State Superintendent Eric Mackey estimated that the statewide enrollment decline would eliminate 500 to 700 teaching positions in the next budget cycle. Districts that are already at record lows face the sharpest cuts. Selma City lost 10% of its state-funded teacher units in a single year, dropping from 143 to 128. Sumter County lost 9%, from 54 to 50.

The deepest losses are in the Black Belt

The 15 districts with the steepest percentage declines from their peaks read like a map of Alabama's Black Belt, the band of majority-Black, high-poverty rural counties stretching through the state's midsection. Perry County has lost 57.7% of its students since 2015, falling from 1,730 to 731. Sumter County is down 52.4%. Wilcox County has lost 45.9%. Selma City has lost 44.3%.

These are not enrollment dips. They are existential declines in communities where the school system is often the largest employer and the last functioning public institution. A district that loses half its students does not simply cut half its budget. Fixed costs for buildings, transportation routes, and administrative staff do not scale linearly with enrollment. What remains is a system trying to operate a full district infrastructure on half the revenue.

The Black Belt's enrollment crisis is driven by population out-migration that has been documented for decades. Working-age residents leave for employment in Birmingham, Huntsville, Montgomery, or out of state entirely, and the families that remain tend to be older or without school-age children. A 2025 PARCA analysis found that Alabama's deaths now exceed its births, a demographic shift that compounds the out-migration effect in rural counties where in-migration provides no offset.

Who is actually growing?

Twenty-four districts hit all-time highs in 2025-26, but the list requires careful reading. The three largest "growth stories" are inflated by statewide virtual schools that are administratively housed within those districts. Limestone County's 91.9% growth is half Alabama Connections Academy (8,307 of 16,633 students). Chickasaw City's 263% growth is 70.8% Alabama Destinations Career Academy.

Strip out the virtual school enrollments and the genuine growth districts are a mix of suburban satellites and charter schools. Madison City, the largest non-virtual grower at 12,876 students, has gained 32.3% by absorbing families moving to the Huntsville metro's tech-driven economy around Redstone Arsenal. Pike Road City, a small suburb southeast of Montgomery, has grown 142% by pulling families out of the Montgomery County system it borders.

The charter schools at record highs are mostly young: LEAD Academy, Legacy Prep, and i3 Academy have existed for fewer than six years, so their "all-time highs" reflect short histories rather than sustained growth trajectories.

Three forces, and a fourth

The enrollment decline has no single cause, but three forces are clearly operating simultaneously.

The first is demographic. Alabama's birth rate has been falling for over a decade. The state's natural population change turned negative during the pandemic, meaning more Alabamians die each year than are born. The children entering kindergarten today come from smaller birth cohorts than the high schoolers graduating out.

The second is the CHOOSE Act, Alabama's education savings account program signed into law in 2023. In its first year, roughly 3,000 students who had been in public schools used CHOOSE Act funds to move to private education. That is a measurable but modest share of the 5,800-student total decline. The Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama found that about three-quarters of the 23,429 CHOOSE Act recipients were already enrolled in private schools, meaning the program's net public-school impact was far smaller than its headline enrollment figure.

The third is the ongoing urban-to-suburban migration pattern visible in the big four's declines. Birmingham loses students to Hoover, Vestavia Hills, and Homewood. Montgomery loses students to Pike Road and Elmore County. Mobile loses students to Baldwin County. This is not a new dynamic, but it is accelerating: the combined suburban ring around Birmingham (Hoover, Vestavia Hills, Homewood, Trussville, Mountain Brook) enrolled roughly 27,000 students in 2026 while Birmingham City enrolled 19,206.

A fourth factor is harder to quantify. Of the 5,800 students who left Alabama's public schools in 2025-26, State Superintendent Mackey acknowledged that roughly 2,100 "just disappeared" with no record of transferring, withdrawing for homeschool, or enrolling elsewhere. "The address we have on file is not correct anymore," Mackey said. Immigration enforcement and family mobility both contribute to students becoming invisible to enrollment systems, but the state cannot distinguish between these causes in its data.

The scatter tells the story

What makes 2026 different from prior years is the breadth of the decline. In 2017, zero Alabama districts were at all-time lows. By 2021, 11 were. In 2025, the number jumped to 30. In 2026 it reached 51. The progression from 30 to 51 in a single year is the largest one-year increase in the data.

The scatter plot reveals something the aggregate counts obscure: the all-time lows are not concentrated in a single district type. Small rural systems, midsized county districts, and the state's largest urban systems are all represented. A 700-student Black Belt county and a 46,700-student coastal metropolis are in the same statistical category. Whatever is driving enrollment downward, it is not selective about geography or scale.

The districts that sit "between" their extremes, plotted in gray, are running out of room. Many are 10% to 20% below their peaks and trending toward their own record lows. If current trajectories hold, the 2027 count could approach 60 or more.

What comes next

The question Alabama faces is whether any of its growth sources can offset the structural decline. The CHOOSE Act is set to expand to universal eligibility in 2027-28, removing the current income cap and opening the program to all Alabama families. With funding already at $250 million, the outflow from public to private schools is likely to grow beyond the 3,000 students who left in its first year. The state's charter sector, though growing, remains small at roughly 1% of total enrollment. And the demographic headwinds, fewer births, aging rural populations, continued out-migration from the Black Belt, show no sign of reversing.

For the 51 districts at all-time lows, the enrollment number is not abstract. It determines how many teachers the state will fund, how many bus routes a county can operate, and whether a school building stays open. In Perry County, where enrollment has fallen below 750 students in a system that once served more than 1,700, the question is not whether the trend will reverse. It is how long the district can sustain the infrastructure of a school system at half its designed capacity.

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.