Wilcox 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.

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.

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.

Eleven Rural Alabama Districts Have Lost 40% of Their Students Since 2015

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

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 losing one classroom every few months with no prospect of the seats filling back up.

Perry County is not an outlier. It is the sharpest edge of a pattern running through Alabama's historic Black Belt, the crescent of rural counties stretching from the state's southwestern corner through its midsection. Across these 11 districts, combined enrollment has fallen from 22,931 to 13,623, a loss of 9,308 students and a 40.6% decline. The state as a whole lost 2.4% over the same period.

The arithmetic of disappearance

Six of these 11 districts have maintained unbroken decline streaks for the full 11-year span of available data. Lowndes County^↗, Macon County^↗, Selma City^↗, Sumter County^↗, and Wilcox County^↗ have each declined every single year since 2015 alongside Perry County. Not one year of recovery. Not one year of holding steady.

The losses are not evenly distributed. Perry County's 57.7% decline leads, followed by Sumter County at 52.4%, Wilcox County at 45.9%, Selma City at 44.3%, and Lowndes County at 44.0%. Even the least-affected districts in this group, Hale County^↗ and Macon County, have lost more than a quarter of their students.

Five of these 11 districts now enroll fewer than 1,000 students. Barbour County^↗ has 537. Perry County has 731. Sumter County and Greene County^↗ each hover just above 800. The median district in this group enrolls 1,007 students, roughly the size of a single large elementary school.

A region emptying from both ends

The enrollment collapse tracks a broader demographic unraveling. Nine of the 10 Alabama counties with the biggest population losses in the 2010s were in the Black Belt. Dallas County, where Selma is located, lost a net 5,000 residents between 2010 and 2020. Perry County's population fell 20% over the same decade, and its median age climbed from 35 to 39.

The mechanism is straightforward: working-age adults leave, and the population that remains skews older and poorer.

"They are positively selected out of the population. They already have higher education, or a skill set that allows them to be mobile." Nyesha Black, University of Alabama demographics director, BirminghamWatch, Jan. 2024

Kenneth Johnson, a sociologist at the University of New Hampshire's Carsey School, put it more bluntly: "The school systems will have to contract because there aren't children anymore to staff all the schools."

The out-migration is not a new phenomenon. But the enrollment data shows it accelerating. These 11 districts lost 824 students in 2016, 847 in 2018, then 1,211 in 2019. The 2024 loss of 1,202 students was nearly as large. The region has not had a single year of losses below 500 students in the entire data window.

Where the funding formula fails

Alabama's Foundation Program, the state's school funding formula, allocates teacher units based on student headcount: fewer students means fewer units, which means fewer teachers and less money. The formula has been in place for three decades and contains no meaningful weight for poverty, rurality, or the fixed costs of operating a school building regardless of enrollment.

For these districts, where 80% to 92% of students are economically disadvantaged, the formula creates a compounding problem. As students leave, funding shrinks. As funding shrinks, the district can offer fewer programs. As programs disappear, more families leave. Selma City's economically disadvantaged rate stands at 92.4%. Wilcox County: 91.9%. Perry County: 91.0%. Lowndes County: 89.7%. These rates are partly inflated by Community Eligibility Provision, which allows high-poverty districts to classify all students as economically disadvantaged for federal meal programs. But even accounting for that, the underlying poverty in these counties is severe. Perry County's census poverty rate is 35.4%, roughly triple the national average. The funding formula treats these districts almost identically to affluent suburban systems.

Alabama's 2025 RAISE Act began moving the state toward weighted student funding for high-needs students, though advocates say the state remains short of a fully weighted formula. The change adds new support, but it does not erase the fixed-cost problem facing districts that have already lost half their enrollment.

The state is already stepping in

Two of these districts are currently under state intervention. The Alabama State Board of Education took over Sumter County Schools in August 2023, when the district had roughly 990 students. The state is now consolidating all four Sumter County schools onto a single campus, a $14 million construction project. Dallas County Schools followed in March 2025, becoming the third district under state control alongside Sumter and Bessemer City. A state audit had flagged $4.9 million in improperly bid services, and only one-third of students were proficient in English language arts.

Dallas County^↗ has lost 38.6% of its enrollment since 2015, falling from 3,312 to 2,032 students. The state intervention is expected to last about two years.

The gap keeps widening

The indexed comparison between these 11 districts' combined enrollment and statewide enrollment illustrates the divergence. Alabama as a whole has held relatively stable, hovering between 97% and 102% of its 2015 baseline over the past decade. The 11-district group has fallen in a nearly straight line to 59.4% of its 2015 enrollment. The gap between the two trajectories widened every single year.

These 11 districts now account for 1.9% of Alabama's total enrollment, down from 3.1% in 2015. Their share has been cut by more than a third. Yet the 9,308 students they lost represent 53.0% of the state's total enrollment decline over that period. More than half of Alabama's net student losses since 2015 have come from a cluster of districts that together enroll fewer students than Huntsville City alone.

What happens next

The CHOOSE Act, Alabama's new voucher-like program, awarded over 23,000 education savings accounts for the 2025-26 school year, totaling more than $124 million. Most recipients were already enrolled in private or homeschool settings, which limits the direct enrollment impact on public schools. But in districts where the nearest private school is 40 miles away, the program offers little practical alternative. It is the districts with the most options that benefit; the ones with the fewest options that pay.

The question for these districts is not whether enrollment will continue to fall. Barring an economic reversal in counties that have been losing population for decades, it will. The question is at what enrollment level a district can no longer function as a district. Barbour County at 537 students is approaching that threshold. Perry County at 731, after losing nearly 1,000 students in 11 years, may cross it before the RAISE Act's weighted-funding changes have enough time to matter. The funding shift is arriving after much of the damage.

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

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. Lawmakers enacted the RAISE Act in 2025, adding weighted funding on top of the Foundation Program beginning in 2025-26 for English learners, students entitled to special education services, and students in high-poverty districts.

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.

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