Sumter County - EdTribune AL - Alabama Education Data

Nine Alabama Districts Haven't Grown in Over a Decade

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

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.

Perry County is not alone. Nine Alabama districts have declined every year for 11 consecutive years, the entire span of data available in the state's enrollment records. Seven of the nine sit in or border the Black Belt, the crescent of historically Black, rural counties stretching across south-central Alabama where population out-migration has hollowed out communities for decades. The other two, Walker County^↗ and Lee County^↗, are losing students for entirely different reasons.

Unbroken decline, unevenly distributed

The nine districts with 11-year decline streaks are Butler County^↗, Lee County, Lowndes County^↗, Macon County^↗, Perry County, Selma City^↗, Sumter County^↗, Walker County, and Wilcox County^↗. Together they lost 9,439 students between 2015 and 2026.

The losses range from Perry County's 57.7% to Lee County's 13.7%, but the pattern is the same: no recovery year after COVID, no stabilization, no single year of growth.

Three more districts, Birmingham City^↗, Mobile County^↗, and Montgomery County^↗, have declined every year for 10 consecutive years. These are far larger systems: Mobile alone lost 10,536 students over the period, more than all nine 11-year streak districts combined. Together, the 12 districts with streaks of 10 years or longer account for 45.5% of all enrollment losses across every declining district in the state.

The Black Belt core

The most severe losses are concentrated in three Black Belt counties where enrollment has effectively halved. Perry County fell from 1,730 to 731 students (57.7%), losing an average of 5.2% of its remaining enrollment each year. Sumter County dropped from 1,695 to 806 (52.4%). Wilcox County went from 1,869 to 1,012 (45.9%).

At these enrollment levels, basic operations become difficult. Perry County's 731 students spread across multiple grade levels may not fill a single section per grade. Sumter County superintendent Marcy Burroughs told the Alabama Reflector that the connection between population and funding is direct:

"We don't have the funds to pay teachers or teacher salary longterm." -- Alabama Reflector, January 2024

The depopulation driving these losses predates the enrollment data. Perry County's population is a third of its 1940 level. As mechanized agriculture eliminated farm labor jobs, younger residents left for cities, aging the population and shrinking the tax base. The poverty rate in Perry County stands at 36%, and Dallas County, where Selma sits, lost roughly 5,000 residents between the 2010 and 2020 censuses.

Selma City's enrollment fell from 3,810 to 2,123 over the period, a 44.3% loss. The neighboring Dallas County school system is now under state intervention, with the Alabama State Board of Education voting in March 2025 to take over personnel, finance, and operations.

Two outliers on the list

Lee County and Walker County have 11-year decline streaks, but their situations differ from the Black Belt districts.

Lee County lost 1,355 students (13.7%), a modest rate by the standards of this list. The county surrounds Auburn, one of Alabama's fastest-growing cities. Auburn City schools, a separate district, gained 1,140 students over the same period. Opelika City, also in Lee County, added 1,158. As the city systems attract families through reputation and investment, Lee County's rural schools appear to be on the losing end of an intra-county transfer dynamic. The county's population is growing; its county school enrollment is not.

Walker County, in northwest Alabama's coal country, lost 1,475 students (18.7%). Superintendent Dennis Willingham told WBRC that the losses reflect population shifts, not school quality: "We're not hearing that it's any fault of our schools." The decline has persisted across economic cycles, with the steepest single-year drop, 382 students, coming in 2025-26.

The scale mismatch

The nine 11-year streak districts collectively lost 9,439 students. Mobile County alone lost 10,536. In percentage terms, Perry County's 57.7% decline dwarfs Mobile's 18.4%. In absolute numbers, the dynamic reverses completely.

This distinction matters for state policy. Alabama's Foundation Program, the funding formula unchanged since 1995, allocates resources primarily through teacher units tied to enrollment counts. When a large district like Mobile loses 10,536 students, the budget impact is measured in tens of millions. When Perry County loses 999 students, the absolute dollar figure is smaller, but the operational consequence is existential: there may not be enough students to justify keeping a school open.

State Superintendent Eric Mackey acknowledged that the state maintains some schools with fewer than 100 students "simply because of remoteness." For the smallest Black Belt systems, the question is no longer how to grow but how long the current structure can be sustained.

What the aggregate trend hides

The combined year-over-year losses for the 12 districts with decade-long streaks mask an important pattern. In 2016, these districts collectively gained 2,315 students, driven by Birmingham, Mobile, and Montgomery. Every year since has been negative, with losses ranging from 1,784 (2020) to 4,935 (2018).

COVID did not cause a visible spike in the aggregate, because these districts were already losing students at a steady pace. The pandemic simply blended into an existing trajectory.

Two districts that had been on this list, Hale County and Tallassee City, broke their streaks in 2026, each gaining a handful of students (six and nine, respectively). Whether these are genuine reversals or statistical noise will not be clear until next year's data.

What the CHOOSE Act adds

Alabama's CHOOSE Act, an education savings account program signed in 2024, drew approximately 3,000 students from public schools in its first year (2025-26). Of the roughly 24,000 students awarded ESAs, about two-thirds were already in private or home school settings.

For districts already on decade-long decline trajectories, even a small additional pull from the CHOOSE Act compounds the pressure. But the enrollment data cannot isolate how many ESA recipients came from these specific districts. The program's statewide impact, while real, is modest compared to the structural demographic forces that have been emptying these communities for decades.

Where this leads

Greene County, with a nine-year decline streak, lost 35.6% of its enrollment since 2015 and is on pace to join the 10-year list next year if the pattern continues. Across Alabama, the state lost 5,800 students in 2025-26, what officials called the largest single-year drop in 40 years.

The question for Perry County, Sumter County, and Wilcox County is not whether enrollment will stabilize. At annual loss rates exceeding 4%, the question is at what enrollment level a district can no longer function as a district. Perry County, with 731 students, is testing that threshold now.

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

714,363: Alabama Hits Its Lowest Enrollment in Over a Decade

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

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 return. No transfer paperwork, no homeschool filing, no private school record. They vanished from the rolls.

Alabama's total K-12 public school enrollment fell to 714,363 in 2025-26, the lowest point in at least 12 years of state data. The drop of 3,110 students from the prior year extends a four-year decline streak that has erased 21,445 students since 2021-22. At the current pace of loss, approximately 5,361 students per year over the past four years, enrollment will fall below 700,000 before the decade ends.

The state that grew, then didn't

Alabama's enrollment story breaks cleanly into three eras. From 2014-15 to 2017-18, the system added 7,744 students, peaking at 749,897 in 2015-16. From 2018-19 to 2021-22, it lost 3,656, a modest contraction centered on the pandemic year. Since 2022-23, the losses have quadrupled: 15,426 students gone in four years, with the single worst year being 2023-24, when enrollment fell by 11,073.

The year-over-year pattern is volatile but directionally unmistakable. Seven of the past nine years have been negative. The two exceptions, 2019-20 (+654) and 2021-22 (+6,022), were pandemic-adjacent bounces that did not hold.

Three forces, one direction

No single factor explains the decline. At least three forces are compounding simultaneously.

The most fundamental is demographic. Alabama's deaths have exceeded its births every year since 2020, with 59,273 deaths against 57,541 births in 2023-24 alone. The state's median age approaches 40. Kindergarten enrollment, the leading indicator of the enrollment pipeline, has fallen from 57,138 in 2014-15 to 55,329 in 2025-26, a decline of 3.2%. Meanwhile, 12th grade enrollment has grown 6.4% over the same period, from 50,140 to 53,346. The kindergarten-to-12th-grade ratio has compressed from 114 to 103.7. More students are graduating out the top of the pipeline than entering at the bottom.

The second force is school choice. The CHOOSE Act, Alabama's education savings account program signed into law in March 2024, drew approximately 3,032 students out of public schools in its first year, according to a PARCA analysis of state data. That accounts for roughly half of the 2025-26 decline. Nearly 24,000 students received ESAs for the current year, though about three-quarters were already in private schools. The Legislature increased the program's appropriation to $180 million and is considering making it universal, which could accelerate public school losses in coming years.

The third is immigration enforcement. Mackey told reporters that superintendents across the state said "a lot" of the missing students appeared to be Hispanic, though schools cannot legally ask about immigration status. In Birmingham, the Hispanic and Immigrant Center of Alabama reported that fear was keeping families home.

"There is a concern among families as to the safety of their children, and thus what we're seeing and we're hearing is a reluctance to send some of these students to school." -- Carlos Aleman, CEO of the Hispanic and Immigrant Center of Alabama, The Birmingham Times

The statewide data is ambiguous. A new federal reporting form that allows students to select multiple racial identities shifted about 52,000 students from "Hispanic" to "two or more races" in 2025-26, making it impossible to isolate actual Hispanic enrollment changes from reclassification effects. State officials said the raw number of students checking the Hispanic box increased by about 1,000, but the classification noise makes the true trend unclear.

The geography of loss

The losses are not evenly distributed. Mobile County^↗, the state's largest district, has shed 4,958 students since 2021-22, a decline of 9.6% in four years. From its 2015-16 peak of 58,529, Mobile has lost 11,829 students, a 20.2% contraction. Birmingham City^↗ has lost 6,248 from its peak, a 24.5% decline. Montgomery County^↗ is down 6,171, or 19.9%.

Nine districts have been declining for 11 consecutive years, the full span of the year-over-year data. Six of them are in or near the Black Belt: Selma City^↗, Perry County^↗, Sumter County^↗, Lowndes County^↗, Macon County^↗, and Wilcox County^↗. Perry County has lost 57.7% of its enrollment since 2014-15, falling from 1,730 to 731. Sumter is down 52.4%, from 1,695 to 806. These are districts where the school system is often the largest employer, and each lost student carries a proportional cut to state funding.

Only 31 of 141 districts with comparable data, or 22%, have recovered to their pre-pandemic enrollment levels. In 2025-26, 86 of 153 districts declined, while 65 grew.

What 500 to 700 fewer teachers means

The fiscal consequences are already materializing. Mackey told WBRC that the enrollment decline translates to 500 to 700 fewer teaching positions in the next budget cycle.

"Teacher jobs are tied to student enrollment, so this is about, this is between 500-700 teacher jobs that'll disappear next year as we work on the next budget cycle." -- Dr. Eric Mackey, State Superintendent, WBRC

The problem is structural. Alabama's Foundation Program, the funding formula that converts student counts into teacher units and teacher units into dollars, has been unchanged since 1995. It does not weight funding for English learners, students entitled to special education services, or students in high-poverty districts. Lawmakers are considering a shift to a weighted student funding model, but that reform has not yet advanced.

For districts already near the edge, a decline of a few dozen students can force the consolidation of classrooms, the closure of a school, or the elimination of an elective program. In rural Black Belt counties where enrollment has been falling for a decade or more, the question is not whether these cuts will happen but how many more years the district can absorb them.

The question for 2027

The most honest answer to why Alabama's enrollment is falling is: all of the above, and we cannot precisely apportion how much of the decline belongs to each factor. Birth rates explain the pipeline compression. The CHOOSE Act explains about 3,000 of the 2025-26 losses. Immigration enforcement appears to explain some of the missing students, but the reclassification of racial reporting makes the magnitude impossible to pin down from the enrollment data alone.

The question for the next school year is whether the CHOOSE Act's expansion to potentially universal eligibility compounds the demographic decline or merely accelerates a transition that was already underway. If 24,000 ESA recipients become 40,000 or more, and three-quarters of them continue to be students already in private schools, the marginal public school impact may remain modest. If the ratio shifts and more public school families opt out, the 700,000 threshold could arrive ahead of schedule.

Alabama has not been above 740,000 students since 2019-20. Fifty-one of its 155 districts are at their lowest enrollment on record. At some point, a decline stops being a trend and becomes the new baseline.

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