Marengo County - EdTribune AL - Alabama Education Data

Alabama's Black Belt: Where Chronic Absenteeism Is Twice the State Average

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

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.

This analysis uses a 20-county Black Belt set. Definitions of Alabama's Black Belt vary, but the region's name traces to its dark prairie soil and later to its majority-Black population in many counties. Those districts have a collective chronic absenteeism rate of 22.4% in 2024-25. The state average is 12.05%. Half of these districts have rates above 20%. Five exceed 30%.

This is the geographic split beneath Alabama's attendance recovery: the statewide number is improving, but the Black Belt average remains far above both the state rate and the rest of Alabama's district average.

The spectrum of crisis

The Black Belt is not monolithic. Chronic absenteeism rates range from 7.65% in Marengo County, actually below the state average, to 48.54% in Barbour County, where nearly half of all students meet the chronic-absence threshold.

Five districts have rates above 30%: Barbour County^↗ (48.54%), Greene County^↗ (37.42%), Bullock County^↗ (35.65%), Perry County^↗ (31.26%), and Washington County^↗ (30.53%). Another five (Sumter, Escambia, Macon County^↗, Crenshaw, and Butler counties) sit between 20% and 28%.

At the other end, Marengo County (7.65%), Pickens County (10.19%), and Russell County (10.92%) are below the state average, a reminder that the regional pattern still contains real local variation.

A gap that won't close

The gap between Black Belt districts and the rest of Alabama is not new, but the pandemic widened it, and the recovery has not narrowed it back.

Before COVID, in 2018-19, Black Belt districts averaged a chronic rate of 13.2% compared to 11.0% for the rest of the state, a gap of about 2 percentage points. By 2024-25, the Black Belt average had risen to 22.4% while the rest of the state dropped to 11.4%, widening the gap to 11 percentage points.

The rest of Alabama's districts nearly returned to their pre-COVID levels (11.4% vs. 11.0%). Black Belt districts are 9.2 percentage points above theirs. The pandemic did not create the Black Belt's attendance problems, but it exposed and deepened them in ways that the recovery has not addressed.

Only three recovered

Of the 20 Black Belt counties, only three have chronic absenteeism rates at or below their 2018-19 levels: Dallas County (down 6.5 percentage points to 17.3%), Marengo County (down 3.6 points to 7.65%), and Wilcox County (down 2.5 points to 15.0%).

The other 17 remain above their pre-COVID baselines, many dramatically so. Greene County is 25.8 percentage points above its 2019 rate of 11.6%. Bullock County is 24.9 points above. Barbour County is 20.4 points above. These are not marginal increases: they represent a fundamental worsening of school attendance.

The scale of deterioration in Greene, Bullock, and Macon counties is particularly striking because their pre-COVID rates were relatively modest in the available data: 11.6%, 10.8%, and 6.6%, respectively. That makes the increases look less like a continuation of a 2018-19 high-rate pattern and more like a post-pandemic break from those baselines.

Structural context

The absence data does not identify causes. The strongest public context is suggestive rather than direct: the Encyclopedia of Alabama notes that nine of Alabama's 10 poorest counties are in the Black Belt and links population shifts to lagging economic growth, poverty, and limited employment. The University of Alabama Education Policy Center separately describes the region's transportation infrastructure deficit, healthcare access challenges, provider shortages, and persistent poverty. None of that proves why a student missed school in 2024-25, but it describes the conditions under which attendance work is being attempted.

Direct evidence on state attendance infrastructure is narrower. EdTrust's Alabama attendance profile says the state uses PowerSchool and Schoology to track attendance patterns and alert staff to students at risk of chronic absence. A state evaluation of the Helping Families Initiative says the program was designed to address chronic absenteeism and student behavior but was not operating as designed across circuits, limiting fidelity and possible effectiveness. That is a competing explanation for the gap between statewide intervention design and Black Belt outcomes: the tools may exist, but implementation capacity may differ from district to district.

The three that recovered

The three Black Belt districts that have recovered to at or below their 2018-19 rates are Dallas County^↗, Marengo County^↗, and Wilcox County^↗. Dallas County dropped from 23.8% to 17.3%, still high in absolute terms. Marengo County's 7.65% rate is below the state average.

Unresourced: Whether these recoveries reflect specific local interventions, data artifacts, demographic changes, or something else is not clear from the absence data alone. They are the exceptions that keep the regional average from being even higher, not evidence that the broader Black Belt pattern has resolved.

Seventeen counties have not found that path yet. The longer rates stay above 20% and 30%, the more students those districts must re-engage.

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

30 Alabama Districts Now Serve Fewer Than 1,000 Students

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In Linden City^↗, the eighth grade class has 19 students. Five of the district's 13 grade levels have fewer than 30. The entire system enrolls 399 children, down 27.8% from 553 a decade ago.

Linden is not alone. Thirty Alabama districts now enroll fewer than 1,000 students, nearly one in five statewide. A decade ago, the count was six.

The number is misleading in one direction: 16 of the 30 are charter schools or specialty academies, most of them recently opened and still scaling up. But strip those out and the picture is worse, not better. The remaining 14 are legacy districts, traditional county and city systems that have been losing students for years and are approaching the enrollment levels where maintaining a full K-12 program becomes structurally difficult.

The count keeps growing

In 2014-15, six Alabama districts had fewer than 1,000 students. By 2019-20, the count had risen to 10. Then the growth accelerated: 17 in 2021-22, 23 in 2023-24, 30 in 2025-26. The share of all districts below 1,000 climbed from 4.4% to 19.4% over the same span.

Part of this is arithmetic. Alabama has added 19 new district-level entities since 2015, nearly all charter schools and specialty academies. These start small by design. But part of it is legacy systems shrinking past thresholds they once sat comfortably above.

Ten districts that were above 1,000 students in 2014-15 have since fallen below. Perry County^↗, which enrolled 1,730 students in 2015, now has 731, a 57.7% loss. Sumter County^↗ dropped from 1,695 to 806, down 52.4%. Choctaw County^↗ fell from 1,577 to 935, losing 40.7%.

What 399 students looks like

The 14 legacy districts below 1,000 collectively enroll 11,196 students, down from 16,241 in 2015, a 31.1% decline. Their average enrollment has fallen from 1,160 to 800.

At the bottom of the list, Linden City's 399 students are spread across 13 grades. The median grade has 32 students, roughly the size of a single classroom. Barbour County^↗ enrolls 537, down 42.8% from 938 in 2015. Elba City^↗ has 584. These are enrollment levels where every departure is felt: a family that moves costs a grade level 3% to 5% of its students.

Six of the 14 legacy districts sit in Alabama's Black Belt, the arc of majority-Black, high-poverty counties stretching across the state's midsection. Perry, Sumter, Greene^↗, Barbour, Marengo^↗, and Lowndes^↗ counties have all been losing students for over a decade, driven by the same forces that have hollowed out these communities more broadly: population out-migration, an aging demographic base, and limited economic opportunity.

"When we have students who leave or parents who move away for better job opportunities, that does cause a strain on the district because those funds leave with those students." -- BirminghamWatch, Jan 2024

In Sumter County, 89% of students are economically disadvantaged compared to 65% statewide. Perry County's population fell 20% between 2010 and 2020, and its total population is now just a third of what it was in 1940. When few families move in to replace those who leave, the enrollment math becomes inescapable.

The mismatch between districts and dollars

Alabama's Foundation Program, the state's primary K-12 funding mechanism, has operated on essentially the same framework for three decades. The formula allocates resources based on student counts to determine staffing "units," an approach that Rep. Danny Garrett has described as: "Here's the money. Here's how you have to spend it for these units."

For a district like Linden City, with a median grade size of 32, the formula generates roughly one teaching unit per grade. But a school still needs an administrator, a counselor, a librarian, maintenance staff, and utilities whether it has 400 students or 4,000. Many operating costs, including building maintenance, administration, and utilities, remain fixed regardless of enrollment, making it structurally difficult to scale down proportionally when students leave.

The RAISE Act, signed in 2025, began layering student-weighted funding on top of the Foundation Program. The law directed $166 million in its first year toward students in poverty, special education, and English learners. For small districts with high concentrations of these populations, the additional per-student dollars could matter. But $166 million spread across a $5.4 billion system is a supplement, not a structural fix for districts whose core challenge is a shrinking student base.

The next 17

The current count of 30 districts below 1,000 may grow. Seventeen districts with enrollment between 1,000 and 1,500 are currently declining. Wilcox County^↗, at 1,012 students, has lost 23.1% in four years. Fairfield City^↗, at 1,175, is down 23.7% since 2022. Talladega City has 1,378, a 19.8% four-year decline. Lowndes County sits at 1,007 students, 12 above the threshold.

The distribution chart reveals the structural imbalance: 30 districts (19.4%) serve fewer than 1,000 students but account for just 2.6% of statewide enrollment. At the other end, six districts with 20,000 or more students enroll 25% of all Alabama students. The system is fragmented at the bottom and concentrated at the top.

Not all small districts are the same

It matters that 16 of the 30 small districts are charter schools and specialty academies. Independence Preparatory Academy (53 students), Freedom Prep Academy (154), and Alabama Aerospace and Aviation (164) are new entrants whose small size reflects their stage of development, not decline. Several have been open for only a few years. LEAD Academy, at 789 students, is one of Alabama's larger charter operations.

The charter districts' median enrollment is 395 students. The legacy districts' median is 848. Both sit below 1,000, but the trajectories point in opposite directions: charters are generally adding students while legacy systems are losing them.

Among the legacy group, one district bucks the trend: Lanett City^↗ has grown 10.6% since 2015, from 881 to 974 students. Coosa County^↗ also posted a modest rebound in 2026 (up 80 students to 770 after years of decline), though whether that holds remains to be seen.

What comes next

Alabama does not have a history of forced school district consolidation, and the political barriers are substantial. County and city school systems carry deep local identity, especially in the Black Belt, where public schools are often the largest employer and the center of community life.

The question is whether districts like Linden City, with 19 eighth graders, or Barbour County, with a median grade of 40 students, can sustain the breadth of programming that K-12 education requires: not just core academics but electives, advanced courses, extracurriculars, and the counseling and support services that high-poverty student populations need. At some point, the enrollment math does not add up, regardless of per-pupil funding levels.

The 2026-27 kindergarten cohort will determine whether the current trajectory continues. If it does, Alabama could have 35 or more districts below 1,000 within two years. Each one will face the same calculus: how thin can a school system stretch before it can no longer deliver what students are entitled to receive?

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

The Black Belt Split: Same Region, Opposite Trajectories

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Alabama Graduation Rates: 2023 Crash · Birmingham · Black Belt · CCR Gap · Conecuh · Foster Care · Gender Gap · Hispanic Gap · Homeless · English Learners · Montgomery · Nine Records · Phenix City · Special Ed · Race Gap

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 distance from state resources. Same story.

The graduation data says otherwise.

Hale County^↗ rose from 80.5 percent in 2015 to 90.5 percent in 2025, a 10.0 percentage point improvement that has pushed it above the state average. Sumter County^↗, one county to the west, fell from 89.5 percent to 72.2 percent, a 17.3-point collapse that leaves it among the lowest-performing districts in Alabama.

That is a 27.3 percentage point swing between neighboring counties sharing a border and a history. Whatever story we tell about the Black Belt as a region, these two counties are living different versions of it.

The split across the region

Hale County is not the only improver. Lowndes County^↗ gained 5.1 points. Macon County^↗ gained 6.1 points. Bullock County^↗ gained 4.2 points. These are modest gains in absolute terms, but in a region where any forward motion is news, they represent real progress.

On the other side: Sumter County^↗ lost 17.3 points. Greene County^↗ lost 8.5 points. Dallas County^↗ lost 7.0 points. Marengo County^↗ lost 3.1 points. Wilcox County^↗ lost 3.6 points.

The pattern is not "the Black Belt is failing." It is "the Black Belt is diverging." And that is a harder story to explain than uniform decline.

Where they stand now

In 2025, Hale County (90.5 percent) is nearly at the state average of 91.6 percent. Sumter County (72.2 percent) is the second-lowest district in the state. The distance between the best and worst in this nine-county region is 18.3 percentage points.

The small-number caveat

Black Belt districts are small. Hale County graduated roughly 60 seniors in 2025. Sumter County graduated fewer than 50. At those cohort sizes, a handful of students dropping out or staying enrolled can shift the rate by several points in either direction.

This does not mean the trends are meaningless: a 17-point decline over a decade is too large and too sustained to be noise. But it does mean that any single year's number should be read with caution. The trajectories matter more than any individual data point.

What the divergence suggests

If the Black Belt's counties shared identical structural constraints, their graduation trajectories should look roughly similar. The fact that they do not suggests that local factors (district leadership, school culture, community engagement, teacher retention) are producing different outcomes from similar starting positions.

Hale County's rise to 90.5 percent from 80.5 percent did not happen because the county suddenly became wealthy or its students suddenly became different. Something changed inside the schools themselves. Identifying what that something is, and whether it is replicable in Sumter or Greene or Dallas, is the question the divergence raises.

By the numbers: 27.3 percentage points, the swing between Hale County (+10.0pp) and Sumter County (-17.3pp) over the past decade. Same region, same demographics, opposite results.

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