Albertville - EdTribune AL - Alabama Education Data

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.

White Students Drop Below 50% in Alabama for First Time

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Alabama 2025-26 Enrollment.

In the late 1990s, nearly two out of three students in Alabama public schools were white. By 2016, that share had fallen to 55.6%. In 2024-25, it reached 50.0%, dropping below the majority threshold for the first time in the state's history of racial enrollment reporting.

The crossing is narrow: white students comprised 402,422 of the 805,263 students identified by race, a share of 49.97% before rounding. But the direction is unambiguous. White enrollment has declined every year for a decade, shedding 43,801 students since 2016, a 9.8% drop. No single year produced a cliff. The decline averaged about 0.6 percentage points annually, then accelerated to 1.2 points in 2024 before settling back to 0.8 points in 2025.

Alabama is not unusual in this. Nationally, white students fell below 50% of public school enrollment in 2014. But Alabama held the line longer than many Southern peers. The state now joins a list that includes South Carolina, Virginia, and Florida where the demographic math has tipped within the last decade.

The growth that offset the loss

White and Black enrollment both fell since 2016: white by 43,801 students, Black by 23,725. Together, the state's two largest racial groups lost 67,526 students. What kept Alabama's total enrollment from collapsing even faster was growth in three smaller groups.

Hispanic enrollment nearly doubled, rising from 52,233 to 87,790, a gain of 35,557 students and a 68.1% increase. Multiracial enrollment more than doubled, growing from 18,460 to 42,305, a gain of 23,845 (up 129.2%). Students identified as Native American grew by 10,348, a 51.1% increase, though this figure likely reflects reclassification patterns rather than population growth of that magnitude.

The combined gains of 69,750 students in these three groups nearly matched the combined losses of 67,526 among white and Black students. The state's student body did not shrink because one group left. It transformed because three groups grew while two contracted.

Where Hispanic growth reshaped districts

The statewide Hispanic share reached 10.9% in 2025, up from 6.5% nine years earlier. But the average masks concentration. In Albertville^↗, Hispanic students constitute 38.1% of race-reported enrollment. In Russellville^↗, they are 38.5%. In Decatur^↗, 27.5%.

These are poultry-processing communities in north Alabama, where the industry has drawn Hispanic families for decades. Albertville's district enrolls roughly 5,800 students. When Haitian immigrants began arriving in 2024 under expanded federal protections, the district enrolled 110 new students in a single year.

That growth has now stalled. Superintendent Bart Reeves told Alabama Daily News in November 2025 that the district's newcomer academy had stopped enrolling new students entirely.

"That's just not happening this year with the closure of the border." -- Alabama Daily News, Nov. 2025

Reeves estimated the enrollment decline would cost the district roughly 12 teaching positions. The state provides $488 per English learner annually, with federal funding adding just $89 per student. For districts that built staffing around a growing EL population, a reversal in immigration patterns creates immediate fiscal pressure.

Thirteen districts flipped from white-majority to majority-minority between 2016 and 2025. Albertville's swing was the largest: from 56.4% white to 32.6%, a 23.8-point shift driven almost entirely by Hispanic growth. Boaz, another poultry-belt district, swung 16.7 points. Florence, Tuscaloosa County, and Decatur each shifted more than 7 points.

The multiracial question

The 129.2% growth in multiracial enrollment since 2016 is the largest percentage increase of any racial group. Some of this reflects genuinely rising rates of multiracial identification, consistent with national Census trends. But a significant share likely reflects how families answer race questions on school forms, not a change in who is sitting in classrooms.

In 2025-26, the federal government changed how schools collect race and ethnicity data. The new form, required by the Office of Management and Budget, replaced the old two-question format (one question on ethnicity, one on race) with a single question inviting respondents to check all identities that apply. The result was stark: the reported Hispanic count dropped by 56,196 while the "two or more races" category jumped by 52,627, a near-perfect offset.

"The number of students who checked the Hispanic box increased by about 1,000 statewide." -- Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama, Dec. 2025

State education officials concluded that many students who previously identified solely as Hispanic were now selecting Hispanic alongside another racial category, landing them in the multiracial bucket. The actual number of students with Hispanic heritage likely grew slightly. But the 2026 data, which contains only total enrollment and no demographics, means the full impact of this reclassification cannot yet be assessed against the longer trend.

The pre-2026 multiracial growth was real and substantial even before the form change: from 18,460 in 2016 to 42,305 in 2025, a period when the old two-question format was still in use. Federal reporting changes amplified an existing trend, but did not create it.

Two Alabamas on either side of 50%

The statewide crossing obscures how polarized Alabama's districts remain. Of 140 districts with at least 500 students reporting race data, 79 still have white majorities and 61 are majority-minority. The distribution is not a bell curve clustering near 50%. It is bimodal: a cluster of districts between 55% and 80% white, and another cluster below 35%.

At one extreme, Winston County is 96.0% white. Mountain Brook, the affluent Birmingham^↗ suburb, is 93.8%. At the other, Wilcox County in the Black Belt is 1.1% white. Selma is 1.4%. Birmingham City, the state's second-largest district with 22,482 race-reported students, is 5.2% white.

The geographic pattern tracks Alabama's historical racial geography almost exactly. Black Belt counties that were plantation centers remain overwhelmingly Black. Appalachian foothill counties remain overwhelmingly white. The demographic change is happening in the middle: mid-sized cities and suburban districts where Hispanic and multiracial growth is reshaping what were once binary Black-white enrollment profiles.

The Black enrollment paradox

Black students' share of enrollment fell from 31.5% to 28.4% between 2016 and 2025, a loss of 23,725 students. In absolute terms, this is the second-largest decline after white enrollment. Yet the Black share has been remarkably stable in the 28-31% band for a decade, because the denominator (total race-reported enrollment) is also shrinking.

The loss is concentrated in the Black Belt and in Alabama's three largest majority-Black urban systems. Mobile County^↗ lost more than 1,000 students in 2025-26 alone. Montgomery and Birmingham have each seen enrollment fall by roughly a fifth over the past decade. The Alabama Reflector reported in 2024 that across 17 rural Black Belt counties, student enrollment dropped 19.8% between 2014 and 2023, nearly eight times the statewide rate of decline.

The out-migration driving these losses is a multi-generational pattern. Young adults leave for employment in Huntsville, Birmingham's suburbs, or out of state entirely. Birth rates in rural Alabama have declined alongside national trends, with Alabama's overall fertility rate dropping to 57.9 per 1,000 women in 2023. The districts left behind face a compounding problem: fewer families means less state funding, which means fewer programs, which accelerates the next round of departures.

What the CHOOSE Act did not do

Alabama's CHOOSE Act, signed in March 2024, created education savings accounts worth roughly $7,000 per student. Given the timing, it is reasonable to ask whether ESA-driven departures contributed to white enrollment decline. The available evidence suggests the impact was modest.

Of the roughly 5,800 students who left Alabama public schools in the CHOOSE Act's first year, approximately 3,000 received ESA funds. But most ESA recipients were already enrolled in private schools. Of the 14,000 students who planned to use ESA funds for private school in 2025-26, about 10,000 (71%) were already attending one. Only 2,428 of 5,060 eligible public school students had activated their accounts as of September 2025, fewer than half.

The CHOOSE Act may accelerate white enrollment decline modestly in future years as the program moves toward universal eligibility in 2027-28. But for now, the demographic shift predates and outpaces the voucher program. White enrollment fell by 43,801 students over nine years. The ESA program moved roughly 2,400 students from public to private in its first year. The trendline was set long before the CHOOSE Act existed.

What comes next

The 2026 data year contains only total enrollment, no demographic breakdowns. Whether white share dropped further, stabilized, or ticked back up cannot be determined until 2027 data is released. The new federal race reporting form adds another layer of uncertainty: the 2025-26 reclassification reshuffled tens of thousands of students between Hispanic and multiracial categories, making year-over-year demographic comparisons unreliable until the new methodology produces at least two consecutive years of data.

The question for Alabama's school leaders is not whether the state's public schools have become majority-minority. They have. The question is what comes after. In north Alabama poultry towns, immigration enforcement is reversing the Hispanic enrollment growth that sustained district budgets. In the Black Belt, depopulation continues with no policy intervention sufficient to reverse it. And in the suburbs, where the demographic change is newest and most contested, the CHOOSE Act's expansion could determine whether the public school system retains these families or loses them to a parallel private system.

The 50% line itself is a statistical artifact. Crossing it changes nothing about how a classroom operates or how a budget is built. But it marks the end of a demographic era in a state where the composition of public school enrollment has been a politically charged question for 70 years, and will remain one.

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