EdTribune AL - Alabama Education Data

Christie Swinney Puts Relationships and Student Support First at Duncanville Middle

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Christie Swinney describes the principal's job at Duncanville Middle School through the experience she wants students to have: feeling safe, knowing they matter and being challenged in class. Her priorities bring relationships and academic expectations together as she leads the Tuscaloosa County^↗ school.

"My top priorities are creating a safe, positive learning environment and building strong relationships with students, staff, and families," Swinney said in written answers to The ALEdTribune. "I want every student to feel supported, valued, and challenged academically."

Swinney confirmed her summer appointment in writing, and the school's administration page identifies her as principal. Alabama's directory previously listed Traci Fox Primm in the role. Swinney's answers describe what she wants to carry forward at Duncanville and where she wants to concentrate her attention.

What drew her to Duncanville

Asked about her path into the role, Swinney emphasized the people she would work with and her interest in students' development during middle school. She described her experience in education as preparation to combine high expectations with compassion and a commitment to student success.

"What drew me to Duncanville Middle School was the opportunity to make a positive difference in the lives of students, staff, and families," she said. "I have a passion for education and believe that middle school is a critical time in a student's development."

Her assessment of the school she inherited was warm and specific to its culture. "Duncanville has a phenomenal school culture and rich tradition," she said. That is the starting point she chose for her account of the transition: a community she is pleased to join, with relationships she wants to strengthen.

Her expectations extend to the adults in the building. "I also want our staff to feel appreciated and empowered while maintaining high expectations for teaching, learning, and student behavior," Swinney said. In her description, supporting teachers and setting expectations for students belong in the same conversation.

The school behind those priorities

Duncanville Middle enrolled 470 students in 2025-26, last school year and the most recent year in Alabama's published enrollment data. On the state's fall headcount, the same count in both years, that was up from 460 in 2024-25, an increase of 10 students, or 2.2%. The increase describes the school before Swinney's appointment; it does not measure an effect of her leadership.

The state's longer record comes from a different report, its annual Report Card counts, which run through 2024-25 and are not directly comparable with the fall headcount. On that record, Duncanville counted 482 students in 2014-15 and 431 in 2024-25, 51 fewer, or 10.6% lower. The years in between included both increases and decreases.

For Swinney's interest in staffing and support programs, enrollment supplies a measure of the students assigned to the school. It cannot establish whether staffing is sufficient, which interventions a student needs or how often a student attends. Those questions require evidence beyond an enrollment count.

The grade breakdown shows the groups her staff is supporting. On last school year's fall headcount, Duncanville reported 160 sixth graders, 171 seventh graders and 139 eighth graders. These are separate groups of students counted in the same school year, rather than a record of a single group moving through school.

The county system's fall headcount was 19,670 students in 2025-26. Duncanville accounted for 2.4% of that enrollment. That places the school within the wider system without treating its share of students as a share of staffing or resources.

Attendance and interventions

Swinney's account of the work ahead moves from school climate to practical support. She said Duncanville is focusing on students' academic, behavioral and social-emotional needs, with attention to the people and programs needed to meet them.

"One of our priorities is ensuring we have the appropriate staffing, resources, and support programs in place to help every student succeed," she said.

She also named attendance and academic interventions directly. "We are also focused on improving student attendance, strengthening academic interventions, and maintaining a safe and welcoming school environment," Swinney said.

Those are statements of direction. Her answers do not identify a staffing vacancy or announce a particular intervention, and the enrollment record cannot show whether attendance or learning has improved. The distinction leaves families with an accurate account of her priorities while keeping the results of that work open to future reporting.

The Tuscaloosa County Board of Education makes meeting agendas and minutes available to the public and says its meetings and work sessions are open. That offers families a public route to follow district decisions alongside the school priorities Swinney has described.

For now, her message returns to the daily experience of students and staff. She wants students supported and academically challenged, and teachers appreciated and empowered. Attendance and interventions give that broad aim practical places to begin: helping students be present for instruction and making support available when they need it.

Enrollment counts come from the Alabama State Department of Education. Figures for 2024-25 and 2025-26 are the state's fall headcount; the 2014-15 through 2024-25 trend uses the state's Report Card counts, a separate report. The two are not compared with each other. The school serves grades 6 through 8 and has no prekindergarten enrollment. The figures describe published school-year counts, not live enrollment.

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Leslie Sedberry Wants Athens Middle Students Welcomed and Challenged

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Leslie Sedberry sees her move from assistant principal to principal of Athens Middle School as a chance to continue serving a community she already knows, with relationships built among students, staff and families.

“Stepping into the principal role allows me to build on that work and continue serving a school community I care deeply about.” Sedberry described that commitment in written answers to The ALEdTribune.

The district's leadership directory lists her as principal. Her earlier assistant principal role also appears in an archived school course catalog, documenting the continuity behind the change in position.

Alabama's most recent published enrollment report records 935 students at Athens Middle in 2025-26, last school year. The figure describes the school before this principal transition. Sedberry's plans now center on students feeling welcomed, supported and challenged, with staff working together to meet their needs.

A familiar community, a new role

Sedberry said serving as assistant principal gave her opportunities to build strong relationships across the school community. Those connections are central to why she wanted to take on the principal's responsibilities.

Her professional background includes National Board certification, recorded in the Athens City^↗ Board of Education's teacher recognitions. In her answers, she connects leadership with teaching and learning, describing the principalship as an opportunity to carry forward work with a staff and community she values.

“I want families to notice a school where every student feels welcomed, supported, and challenged to grow each day.” Her description brings a positive school environment together with academic expectations. She hopes families will see strong classrooms, positive relationships and staff committed to helping children succeed.

The emphasis is on how students experience the school, as well as the work adults do together. Sedberry's answers return to collaboration, support among colleagues and the importance of keeping students' needs at the center of school systems.

“I also hope they see strong classrooms, positive relationships, and a staff that is committed to helping every child succeed.” Her answer puts the adults in the building alongside the classroom experience. She wants families to see a common commitment to their children, with positive relationships supporting the expectations she describes for students.

A larger middle-grade school

Alabama publishes school enrollment in two reports that count differently, so this profile reads each one on its own terms.

The state's Report Card counts, which run through 2024-25, show a school that grew once those records began covering sixth grade. Athens Middle reported 817 students in 2018-19, the first year those records cover sixth through eighth grade, and 937 in 2024-25. That is 120 more students, or 14.7%. Before 2018-19 the records cover only seventh and eighth grade, so the chart keeps those years on a separate line.

The rise was not continuous. The Report Card total peaked at 970 in 2021-22, and 2024-25 sat 33 students below that high.

The fall attendance report, the source for the 2025-26 figure, is the one to use for last year's change. On that basis Athens Middle counted 935 students in 2024-25 and 935 again in 2025-26, so enrollment held level in the year before the principal transition.

Asked what growth asks of staff, Sedberry emphasized their ability to work together around students' needs. “Growth asks our staff to remain flexible, collaborative, and focused on meeting the needs of every student.” She also described strengthening school systems, supporting colleagues and maintaining a positive learning environment.

Supporting students across the grades

Last school year's grade counts were close in size: 311 sixth graders, 309 seventh graders and 315 eighth graders. Those counts reconcile exactly to the published school total of 935.

Sedberry's emphasis on collaboration has a practical context in the school's posted curriculum guide. It describes a Problem-Solving Team involving teachers, administrators, counselors and other participants as needed. The group discusses students' needs and ways to assist teachers, including instructional approaches, interventions and behavioral support.

The same guide describes core coursework in English, mathematics, science and social studies, alongside elective choices. It also identifies PowerSchool as a way for parents and students to access grades. These descriptions put classroom instruction, individual support and family access to information within the broader school setting Sedberry discusses.

Athens Middle within the district

Athens Middle accounted for 16.4% of Athens City's published district enrollment of 5,688 in 2025-26. It was the district's second-largest school by the individually published school totals. The district count includes 160 pre-K students at other schools, while Athens Middle's published total reports none, so the share is a guide to scale rather than a like-for-like comparison.

Those figures show the scale of the community Sedberry is leading. Her own answers focus on the experience within that community: classrooms where children are challenged, relationships that support them and adults who remain flexible as they work together.

For families, her stated goal is a school where welcome and support accompany learning. For staff, it is collaboration and support for one another. Sedberry's principalship builds on existing relationships, with a commitment to continuing the work of a school community she says she cares deeply about.

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Nick Looney Builds on Relationships at Athens Elementary

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 12:00:00 GMT

For Nick Looney, becoming principal of Athens Elementary School means continuing work in a building he already knows, with relationships he wants families to feel as soon as they enter.

“When they enter our building this fall, I want families to feel welcome, comfortable, and confident that this is a great place for their children to learn and grow.” Looney offered that perspective in written answers to The ALEdTribune, describing a neighborhood school where contact with families is part of everyday life.

His appointment appears in the Athens City^↗ Board of Education's spring personnel approvals, and the district's school directory lists him as principal. The move follows his work as the school's assistant principal, a role also documented in an earlier board school report.

Alabama's most recent published enrollment report records 454 students at Athens Elementary in 2025-26, last school year. That total includes 73 pre-K students. It describes the school before this principal transition and gives context for the early-grade work Looney discusses.

Continuing work in a familiar school

Looney said his move from secondary education into an elementary setting initially brought uncertainty about what to expect. Working at Athens Elementary changed that perspective. When the principal position opened, he wanted to continue serving the school and building on its existing work with staff.

His secondary-school background also appears in the Athens City Schools Foundation's Teacher of the Year archive, which names him as an Athens Middle School honoree. His path to the principalship thus includes both secondary teaching and elementary administration.

In his answers, Looney emphasizes staff participation in the systems and structures developed at Athens Elementary. The direction he describes is continuity: maintaining a shared approach to instruction while investing in the collaboration needed to carry it forward.

That approach brings together organization and relationships. Clear instructional expectations matter to him, but so do children feeling safe and families feeling connected. He describes the early years as shaping children's first experiences with school, making the atmosphere of the building part of the work of leading it.

Looney wants decisions about the school to come back to whether they help students learn and thrive. His emphasis on teacher collaboration connects that question to daily practice: adults working together around the knowledge, skills and confidence children will need as they move through the elementary grades.

An early-grade landscape

Last school year's published grade counts place 100 children in kindergarten, 95 in first grade, 90 in second grade and 96 in third grade. Those groups, together with the pre-K group, form the reported enrollment landscape.

The kindergarten through third-grade counts sum to 381. Adding the 73 pre-K students gives the published school total of 454.

Looney's vision reaches across the grade span. He wants teachers to see students' learning as a continuous journey, with the work in a classroom preparing children for what comes next. His description includes pre-K and kindergarten as important parts of the school's learning environment, and the school's published total counts its pre-K children.

The school itself is listed as serving pre-K through third grade in the district's school directory. For Looney, the early-grade setting calls for an environment that is safe, joyful and structured, alongside deliberate attention to what children will know and be able to do when they leave.

A neighborhood connection

“We are a community school; our students and their families in some cases live literally across the street from the school.” Looney said being located among neighborhoods creates opportunities to interact regularly with families.

He also described language access as part of that relationship. In his account, the school has prioritized hiring staff who can help connect with Spanish-speaking families and support communication about children. He wants parents to know that the school sees them as partners.

“I want families to know that we see them, seek to partner with them, and we are excited to serve their children.”

The state's earlier English learner report offers a separate instructional-support measure. In 2024-25, Athens Elementary reported 113 English learners against a published school total of 396, or 28.5%. Those figures cover the same grades and exclude pre-K. English learner classification does not measure the language spoken at home, and this earlier report cannot establish the school's composition last school year or now.

Part of Athens City

Athens Elementary represented 8.0% of Athens City's published district total of 5,688 students in 2025-26. School and district totals use the same reporting year and both include pre-K.

Earlier years come from a different state report, the Report Card counts, which also handle pre-K differently. Setting those figures beside last school year's fall attendance count would mix two measures, so this profile uses the 2025-26 snapshot on its own to describe the school's scale.

Looney's stated priority is to connect that early-grade work with a school where relationships remain central. He wants students to experience joy and structure, teachers to collaborate around clear expectations and families to feel comfortable engaging with the school. For the new principal, continuing familiar work also means keeping those relationships at the center of the decisions ahead.

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Michelle Scott Centers Belonging at Oscar Adams Elementary

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Michelle Scott wants families arriving at Oscar Adams Elementary School to notice a welcome before anything else: a smile for a child, a sense of partnership for a parent and adults who connect academic expectations with care.

“I want Oscar Adams to be a place where every child is greeted with a smile, every family feels like a valued partner, and every staff member is committed to ensuring students experience both academic excellence and genuine care.” Scott described that vision in written answers to The ALEdTribune.

Scott became principal this summer through an appointment recorded by the Gadsden City Board of Education. The school's administration directory lists her in the role. She follows Ali Sullivan, whose transfer from Adams principal to Litchfield Middle assistant principal appears in the board's earlier personnel recommendations.

The most recent published Alabama enrollment report places the school at 413 students in 2025-26, last school year. The school reports no pre-K students, and the count describes Adams before Scott's principalship. It provides a starting point for understanding the school she has joined, rather than a measure of her leadership.

A foundation in the early years

Scott said the opportunity to join Adams appealed to her because of its history, community pride and potential. She described seeing dedicated educators, supportive families and children deserving opportunities to thrive. Her intention is to build on those strengths through collaboration with staff, families and the wider community.

“My background in early childhood education has shaped every aspect of my leadership.” For Scott, the early years inform how a principal approaches children across an elementary school, including their academic, social and emotional needs.

The board's appointment record lists certifications in instructional leadership, early childhood education and early childhood special education. Those credentials align with the emphasis she places on establishing a strong foundation for learning.

Scott said her responsibility is to meet children where they are and help them grow. She connects that approach with classrooms where students are engaged and learning is rigorous, meaningful and joyful. Teachers feeling supported and families knowing their voices matter are part of the same vision, in her account.

The published grade counts give that work a concrete setting. Last school year's report lists 70 kindergarten students and 61 fifth graders, with children reported throughout the elementary grades in between. These are separate grade groups, not a forecast of how a class will change as it moves through school.

The individually reported grade counts add to 413, the same as the published school total, so no part of the total is left unassigned.

Language and family partnership

Scott also identifies English learner support as central to the school culture she wants to build. Her emphasis is on students receiving instructional help while feeling included and celebrated, with families participating in that work.

“Every language and every culture represented at Oscar Adams is an asset that enriches our school community.” Her proposed approach includes partnering closely with families and providing teachers with resources and professional learning, so that language differences are embraced as strengths.

The state's separately published English learner figures end earlier than the enrollment report. In 2024-25, Adams reported 135 English learners against a published school total of 408 students, or 33.1%. Both figures cover the same elementary grade span and exclude pre-K. This older snapshot helps explain the relevance of Scott's priority; it does not establish the school's English learner share last school year or in the current school year.

Scott's description places family partnership alongside instructional support. She wants parents to feel valued when they enter the school and to know their voices matter in children's education. In her account, a welcoming atmosphere and strong relationships accompany high expectations for achievement.

Adams within Gadsden City

Adams accounted for 8.3% of Gadsden City^↗'s published district total of 4,990 students in 2025-26. The school and district figures use the same reporting year, but the district total includes 101 pre-K students at five other schools, while Adams reports none, so the share is a guide to scale rather than a like-for-like comparison.

Earlier years come from a different state report, the Report Card counts, which also handle pre-K differently. Setting those figures beside last school year's fall attendance count would mix two measures, so the 2025-26 snapshot is the useful context here. It shows the scale of Adams within the district while Scott's own answers explain the relationships and classroom experiences she wants to shape.

“Ultimately, I want Oscar Adams Elementary to be known as a school where every child belongs, every educator is empowered, and every family feels connected.” That statement brings together her priorities for students, staff and parents.

Scott describes success in terms that extend beyond test scores: relationships, students' confidence and opportunities that last beyond elementary school. Her stated goal is to work alongside the Gadsden community in a school where excellence is expected and children have the opportunity to succeed. The welcome she hopes families notice at the door is the starting point for that broader commitment.

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Kevin Daniel Leads Riverton Intermediate After Four Straight Years of Growth

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Kevin Daniel did not arrive at Riverton Intermediate School as a stranger. He grew up around the community it serves. Daniel became principal of the Madison County^↗ school on July 1, and he takes over a building that has been getting bigger: Riverton Intermediate counted 921 students in 2025-26, the most recent school year in the state's published data, and its highest total in state records going back to 2014-15.

"The biggest draw for me in coming to Riverton Intermediate was simply the community, our students, families, and the staff here at RIS," Daniel wrote in answer to questions from The ALEdTribune. "I grew up around this community, competing alongside and against its students in academics and athletics, so I already knew the values that define it."

Daniel confirmed his start date in writing in July. Alabama's state school directory previously listed April McCutcheon as the school's principal.

A Madison County career

Daniel's path to the principal's office runs almost entirely through Madison County Schools. According to his biography on the school's website, he is a graduate of the district who finished at Hazel Green High School, then earned a bachelor's degree from the University of North Alabama and a master's degree in educational leadership from Arizona State University. He has worked at New Hope High School, Meridianville Middle School and Monrovia Middle School, and most recently served as assistant principal at Madison County Elementary School.

That history is why he describes the job as a return to people he already understood. "This is a community that values hard work and integrity and is deeply committed to providing the very best for its children," he wrote.

He was just as direct about the staff he inherited. "I was equally drawn to the remarkable work of the staff at RIS," Daniel wrote. "The success they have built over the past several years is a testament to their ability, dedication, and unwavering focus on student learning."

A school that keeps adding students

The enrollment record gives that description some weight. Riverton Intermediate serves fourth, fifth and sixth graders, and its count has risen in each of the last four years, from 782 in 2021-22 to 921 in 2025-26. The two most recent years did most of the work: the school went from 825 students in 2023-24 to 871 in 2024-25, then added another 50. That is 96 more students in two years, an 11.6% increase. In 2014-15, the school counted 748.

Size is part of what makes the job distinctive. Riverton Intermediate was the sixth-largest of Madison County's 28 schools in 2025-26; only three high schools and two middle schools enrolled more. Riverton Elementary School counted 603 students. Madison County as a whole enrolled 19,991 students that year.

The school has also been taking a slightly larger slice of the county's students in its grades. In 2025-26, Riverton enrolled 19.6% of all Madison County fourth, fifth and sixth graders, up from 17.7% in 2014-15.

The state's data shows where the students are but not why they came. Nothing in the enrollment file separates new housing, attendance-zone changes, or families moving within the county, so the growth is a fact about the building rather than an explanation of it. Current-year counts will also differ once the state publishes 2026-27 data.

Daniel's first-year plan is not built around changing course. "In my first year, my focus is not on changing what has made RIS successful, but on protecting and strengthening the pillars already in place," he wrote. "I want to honor the work that brought us here while finding thoughtful ways to build upon that foundation and continue moving our school forward."

"Clear is kind"

Asked what he wants families and staff to understand about his approach, Daniel went straight to communication. "My main message to our families and staff centers on clarity," he wrote. "I believe that clear is kind. When we are willing to communicate clearly it demonstrates how deeply we care about the people involved and the work we are doing together."

He did not frame clarity as a way to avoid disagreement. "We may not always agree on every issue, but when we communicate clearly, honestly, and factually, we give ourselves the best possible opportunity to move forward together in a positive and productive direction," he wrote.

Three grades, three jobs

An intermediate school has students for only three years, and at a school this size it is fair to ask how any one child avoids getting lost in the middle. Daniel's answer is that each grade has a different assignment. "Our approach to preparing students for middle school is intentionally developmental," he wrote.

"In fourth grade, our focus is on belonging and identity," Daniel wrote. "We want students to understand what it means to be part of the Wolf Pack and to begin developing their own story within our school community." Fifth grade shifts the weight toward the student. "In fifth grade, we raise expectations for both academics and self-advocacy," he wrote. "Students are encouraged to take greater ownership of their learning, communicate what they need, and begin developing the leadership skills they will need as our oldest students."

Sixth grade is where the plan points outward. "By sixth grade, we are preparing students for the transition ahead," he wrote. "We identify student ambassadors who serve our school in a variety of ways and provide our sixth graders with meaningful opportunities to lead. We view this final year at RIS as a dress rehearsal for middle school, with increased expectations for academic responsibility, behavior, independence, and leadership."

That final year is also the school's biggest. Riverton counted 327 sixth graders in 2025-26, compared with 298 fifth graders and 296 fourth graders, and it was the largest sixth-grade count in the state's records for the school. The same grade grew as it moved through the building: Riverton had 297 fourth graders in 2023-24 and 327 sixth graders two years later, a gain of 30. Grade counts are not the same children tracked over time, since they net out students who arrive, leave or repeat a grade. But the pattern is not new. In 8 of the 10 two-year stretches the state's records allow, from 2014-15 onward, Riverton's sixth grade ended up larger than the fourth grade it started as, and the most recent stretch showed the biggest gain.

Daniel described the goal in terms of who students become, not just what grade comes next. "The goal is that our students do not simply leave RIS ready for seventh grade," he wrote. "We want them to leave knowing who they are, how to advocate for themselves, how to lead others, and how to meet the expectations of the next chapter in their education."

For a principal who says his first job is protecting what already works, the enrollment line sets the test. The building he inherited has grown four years running, and its sixth grade is now the largest it has been in state records. Whether the belonging-first approach in fourth grade and the ambassador roles in sixth can hold at that scale is the question his first year will begin to answer.

Enrollment counts come from the Alabama State Department of Education. Years refer to the school year ending in the spring; 2025-26 is the most recent year the state has published. Riverton Intermediate reports no prekindergarten students in any year, so its totals are comparable across the full 2014-15 to 2025-26 window. Madison County's share comparison uses the county's published grade 4, 5 and 6 counts.

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Huntsville's Chronic Absenteeism Is Now Lower Than Before COVID: A Rare Success Story

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Huntsville City Schools brought chronic absenteeism below its pre-pandemic level in 2024-25. Among Alabama districts with comparable published records, 55 of 137, or 40%, were at or below their 2018-19 rates.

The district's rate dropped to 8.23% in 2024-25, well below its pre-COVID baseline of 11.41% from 2018-19. That 3.18 percentage point improvement beyond the baseline came after three consecutive years of decline from a COVID peak of 18.84% in 2021-22.

In a state where most districts are still fighting to get back to pre-pandemic levels, Huntsville has already moved past that benchmark and kept going.

Three years of steady progress

Huntsville's recovery has been gradual and consistent rather than dramatic. After peaking at 18.84% in 2021-22, the rate declined each year: 18.11% in 2022-23, 13.35% in 2023-24, 8.23% in 2024-25. The first of those steps was small, less than a point, and the two that followed were close to 5 points each.

Huntsville sustained its decline for three straight years, and its 2024-25 rate of 8.23% is the lowest the district has recorded in any year the state has published. This comparison begins in 2018-19; the state data used here have no chronic-absence figures for 2019-20.

Asked what changed after the 2021-22 peak, the district described a change in method rather than a new program. Huntsville City Schools "strengthened its overall attendance framework and moved toward a more proactive, data-driven approach," Ms. Jasmine Green, the district's student welfare coordinator, said in a written statement provided by the school system. "We increased our focus on early identification and intervention rather than waiting until attendance concerns became severe."

Schools review attendance data on a regular cycle and flag students who are beginning to slip. Attendance Task Force teams, Ms. Green wrote, "provide a structured opportunity for school personnel to review individual student needs, identify barriers contributing to absences, and determine appropriate interventions." Cases that need more than a conversation at school go to social workers, who take on barriers that "may include transportation, housing instability, health concerns, family circumstances, or other challenges affecting regular school attendance." Ms. Green described the job as a shared one: "Administrators, teachers, counselors, social workers, nurses, families, and community partners all have a role."

Nearly every student group improved beyond 2018-19

The most striking aspect of Huntsville's recovery is that it extends across almost every student group. Eight of the ten groups the state reports for the district are now below their pre-COVID rates:

Students receiving special education services improved the most, dropping from 16.38% in 2018-19 to 7.75% in 2024-25, an 8.63 percentage point improvement that leaves them below the statewide rate for every group Alabama tracks except Asian students. The rate for students who are economically disadvantaged fell from 16.75% to 11.21%, a 5.54-point improvement. Black students went from 14.49% to 9.56%.

Two groups did not recover. The rate for students learning English rose from 6.67% in 2018-19 to 7.53% in 2024-25, a 0.86 percentage point increase, and Pacific Islander students rose from 10.11% to 11.59%, up 1.48 points. Both changes are small in absolute terms, and 7.53% is still among the lower group rates in the district. Huntsville's English learner enrollment grew over the same period from 1,420 students to 2,441, from about 6% of the district to about 11%, so the group being measured in 2024-25 is substantially larger than the one measured in 2018-19. The Pacific Islander group numbered 105 students in 2024-25, small enough that a handful of students moves the rate by a full point.

Asked whether the district had more to say about that group, Ms. Green sent a second written statement. As Huntsville welcomes "more multilingual and newly arrived families, we are working closely with our ESOL Department and EL Parent Liaisons to identify and address barriers that may impact regular school attendance," she wrote. The liaisons, in her account, "play an important role in helping families navigate the school system, understand attendance expectations and procedures, overcome language and cultural barriers, and connect with needed resources." That collaboration, she wrote, "allows us to provide more targeted support to newly arrived families while continuing to monitor attendance trends within our growing English learner population."

The statement describes an approach rather than a result. The group's rate remains above its 2018-19 level, and these data cannot say what the district's work with families who are new to Huntsville has or has not changed.

Among large districts, a standout

Only five of Alabama's ten largest districts by enrollment have recovered to pre-COVID chronic absenteeism levels. Huntsville's improvement of 3.18 percentage points beyond baseline ranks third among those ten, behind Birmingham City (6.35 points below its 2018-19 rate) and Limestone County (4.01 points).

The contrast with its geographic neighbor is stark. Madison County^↗, which borders Huntsville^↗, has seen its rate worsen by 5.61 percentage points above its 2018-19 baseline, rising from 8.74% to 14.35%. Two adjacent communities, with the city system outperforming the surrounding county by nearly 9 percentage points relative to their respective starting points.

Jefferson County^↗ sits 6.50 points above its pre-COVID rate. Montgomery County^↗ is 13.34 points above. Against this backdrop, Huntsville's trajectory represents one of the clearest success stories in Alabama attendance data.

What it means at 8.23%

Applied to Huntsville City Schools' published 2024-25 enrollment of 22,776, the 8.23% rate implies roughly 1,900 students who were chronically absent. This is a computed approximation, rather than a published headcount. It is not zero, and two groups sit above the district's overall figure: Black students at 9.56% and economically disadvantaged students at 11.21%. Both are nonetheless well below the statewide rates for those same groups, which were 14.47% and 15.31% in 2024-25.

The district's own account of what sits behind that number is about diagnosis more than enforcement. Families respond best when the approach is "supportive, individualized, and focused on problem-solving," Ms. Green wrote. "A letter or notification may begin the conversation, but direct contact with a family often helps us better understand why a student is missing school."

The districts also serve different student populations. In 2024-25 the state classified 52.7% of Huntsville's students as economically disadvantaged, against 76.7% in Montgomery County and 84.5% in Birmingham^↗ City. These figures describe the students the state classified in each district; they do not isolate the effect of a school system's attendance practices.

The three annual declines document progress. The data do not establish which attendance practices caused it. Ms. Green put the district's aim this way: "Our goal is not simply to tell families that attendance is important; it is to identify what may be preventing a student from attending and determine what support can help that student return to school consistently."

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A Mentor's Handoff in Satsuma: Heather Roe Steps Up at Lee Elementary

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Heather Roe does not need a tour of the building she now leads. She did her leadership internship at Robert E. Lee Elementary, then served there as assistant principal and preschool director. This year she takes over as principal of the school where she trained to lead, a campus the state counted at 777 students in 2025-26, just over half of Satsuma City^↗'s enrollment.

She steps into the role at a school, and a district, that have been moving in the opposite direction from the rest of Alabama. Satsuma City enrolled 1,497 students in 2025-26, up 223 students, or 17.5%, from 2015. Statewide enrollment fell 0.7% over the same 12 reporting years.

"As a former Gator myself, I was immediately drawn to the core values of excellence and high expectations in Satsuma City Schools," Roe wrote in response to questions from The ALEdTribune. "I believe we should see each child, know each child, and grow each child."

A career built toward this room

Roe began her career as an English Language Arts teacher at Murphy High School in Mobile, according to WKRG News 5. She later taught at Satsuma High School, where she was named Teacher of the Year. After completing her leadership internship at Lee Elementary, she became the school's assistant principal and preschool director.

She succeeds Suzanne Bahr, who retired at the end of the school year after a long career at Lee. Bahr arrived as a second-grade teacher and later became principal. Superintendent Dana Price told WKRG that Bahr "has provided outstanding leadership and will leave Lee Elementary in a strong position."

For Roe, the succession is personal. "Mrs. Bahr served as an incredible mentor from the time I was doing my leadership internship to my last day of being an assistant principal," she wrote. "She included my voice on decisions and coached me to grow as an administrator. To this day, we are close friends and speak often."

What did the mentorship leave behind? "She taught me to center my leadership approach on relationships, growth, high expectations, and joy," Roe wrote. "Because of her influence in my life, I will carry the belief that every child has potential and every staff member has a purpose. It is my job to provide an optimal environment for their strengths to flourish."

The school she inherits

Lee Elementary is the larger of Satsuma City's two schools. The building serves prekindergarten through sixth grade, according to Roe, while Satsuma High School houses the upper grades. The state's enrollment file carries no prekindergarten count for any Alabama school in 2025-26, so the counts in this article describe the kindergarten through sixth grade part of the building rather than everyone in it. On that basis the campus has added 143 students since 2015, a 22.6% increase from its 634-student starting point in the state's records. Those figures are from 2025-26, the most recent year in Alabama's published enrollment data. Roe keeps her own head count for this fall, on the school's full prekindergarten through sixth grade basis, and the state will not publish a 2026-27 figure until next year, so nothing here matches what the building is counting today.

The growth has not been a straight line. Lee climbed steadily through the second half of the 2010s, lost ground in 2020-21, sat in a narrow band for the three years after that, and then added students in each of the last two. Its 777 students in 2025-26 are the most the state has recorded at the school in these 12 years.

The district shows a similar shape. Satsuma City reached 1,544 students in 2019-20, gave back ground through 2022-23, and has added students in every year since.

The bars show the pattern year by year: five consecutive gains through 2019-20, a sharp loss the following year, two smaller losses after that, and growth in each of the last three years.

That trajectory is unusual in Alabama, where statewide enrollment has drifted slightly down. Indexed against 2015, Satsuma City sits 17.5% above its starting point while the state sits just below its own.

A growing elementary school is a specific kind of leadership assignment. Every added kindergarten section ripples into staffing, classroom space, and the daily logistics of arrival and dismissal. Roe's stated priorities map directly onto that work.

Three goals, in her words

Asked what families should know first, Roe pointed to continuity, not reinvention. The school will keep working on what she called its "three main school improvement goals": strengthening academic achievement, developing staff, and providing safe, clean, and welcoming facilities.

"We are proud of the progress we have made over the past six years," she wrote, a window that spans Bahr's principalship and her own tenure in the front office. "We are on a mission to grow, learn, and succeed this year. I cannot wait to see what we can accomplish together!"

The through-line in her answers is the school community itself. "Lee Elementary's staff and families work together to achieve excellence for our children, and I am immensely grateful for a chance to serve as a leader in those efforts," she wrote.

Roe's tribute to her mentor, given to WKRG in April, sounded the same notes: "Mrs. Bahr has been an incredible mentor and example to me. I have learned so much from the way she leads with vision, humor, compassion, and high expectations."

The test of a mentorship is what happens after the mentor leaves. At Lee Elementary, that experiment starts with the first bell of the 2026-27 school year, in a building that closed out the previous year with the most students the state has ever recorded there.

Enrollment counts come from the Alabama State Department of Education. Prekindergarten is excluded from every count and comparison in this article. The state folds prekindergarten into its published totals in some years and leaves it out in others, and carrying it across those years would show a change in what was counted as though it were a change in how many children enrolled.

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

A Homecoming in Piedmont: Michele Downey Steps Into a Growing Elementary School

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Michele Downey did not have to learn her way around Piedmont Elementary School this summer. She was already inside the building, working as its assistant principal, when the district moved her into the principal's office on July 1. She now leads a campus that the state counted at 477 students in 2025-26, a school that has added students in each of the last two years while Piedmont City^↗, the district around it, has not.

"My path to the principal's office has truly been a journey of learning and growing alongside students and teachers," Downey wrote in response to questions from The ALEdTribune. "I've spent 22 years in education, and I have been part of the Piedmont City School System since 2004."

An internal promotion, not an outside hire

Downey's own account of her career maps a route through nearly every level of the district she now helps lead. "During that time, I've had the opportunity to teach at the middle school, upper elementary, and high school levels, as well as serve as an elementary assistant principal," she wrote. She confirmed the handoff itself in a short note on June 22, signed with her outgoing title as the school's assistant principal. She was replacing Brigett Stewart, effective July 1.

That continuity shapes how she talks about the assignment. "Being at Piedmont Elementary feels especially meaningful because this community has been such an important part of my journey in education," she wrote. "I know the people, the pride, and the commitment that make Piedmont special, and I am honored to now serve as principal of PES."

A school growing against the grain

The enrollment data backs up the sense of momentum in her answers, though the state's own reporting changes limit how far back that comparison can honestly run. Alabama's enrollment file dropped prekindergarten counts from every school's total starting in 2024, so the only years that measure the same thing at Piedmont Elementary are 2024, 2025 and 2026. Over that span, the school added 12 students, climbing from 465 to 477, a 2.6% increase across two straight years of gains.

That growth stands out because almost nothing else nearby is growing. Piedmont City enrolled 996 students in 2025-26, three fewer than in 2024, a 0.3% decline, and Alabama's statewide enrollment fell 0.6% over the same two years. The district ranked 126th of 155 Alabama districts by enrollment that year. Piedmont Elementary's own share of that district has widened even as the district shrank, from 46.5% of Piedmont City's enrollment in 2024 to 47.9% in 2025-26.

A single elementary school pulling away from a flat district and a shrinking state, over just two comparable years, is not enough data to call a durable trend. It is enough to say that whatever is drawing families to Piedmont Elementary right now, the same pull is not showing up in the rest of the district or in Alabama as a whole.

A renovation, a rebuilt staff, and a foundation year

Downey's own explanation for the moment does not lean on the enrollment numbers. It leans on the building itself. "This first year is unique because we are also transitioning into a renovated school facility," she wrote. "There is a great deal of excitement surrounding the new space, but there are also many moving pieces as we work through the final stages of the renovation and make the building feel like home for our students and staff."

She is doing that with a partly new team. "We have also welcomed several new staff members and are focused on building a strong, cohesive team," she wrote. Her framing for the year is deliberately modest in scope. "I see this first year as a foundation-building year," she wrote. "We are taking a close look at what is working, identifying opportunities for growth, and building systems that will serve our students and teachers well for years to come."

That patience shows up in her instructional priorities too. "My first priority is to build upon the strong culture and foundation that already exists at Piedmont Elementary," she wrote. "We have dedicated teachers, staff, and families who have worked hard to create a school where students feel safe, supported, challenged, and excited to learn." On instruction specifically, she wrote, "I want us to be very intentional about using student data to understand what students know, where they need support, and how we can strengthen instruction." She added, "I also want to emphasize collaboration among teachers, particularly across grade levels, so that we are building consistency and strong academic foundations as students move through our school."

Piedmont Elementary's own grade pipeline gives that cross-grade goal something concrete to work with. The school's kindergarten class stood at 96 students in 2025-26, well above its fifth-grade class of 80, a ratio of about 1.2 kindergartners for every fifth-grader that year. If that entering group holds together as it moves up, the coordination Downey described between grade levels will matter more with each passing year, not less.

The school's 2024-25 rows, the most recent year Alabama published a full demographic breakdown before a federal reclassification change altered how race and ethnicity are reported, show a student body that is 81.9% white and 10.2% Black, with 67.7% of students economically disadvantaged and 17.0% receiving special education services. Race and service categories overlap with each other in the state's reporting, so none of those figures should be read as parts of a single whole.

What families should expect

Downey framed her goal for the year around the students themselves rather than around any single initiative. "My goal is to help make PES a place where every student feels valued, supported, and empowered to reach his or her full potential," she wrote. She closed her answers the same way she opened them, pointing back to the people already in the building: "Most importantly, I want our students and staff to know that they belong here, that their work matters, and that we are all working together toward the same goal: helping every student reach his or her full potential."

For a principal moving from the front office next door rather than from another town, that continuity is not a talking point. It is close to the whole pitch: the renovation will finish, the new staff will settle in, and the enrollment line that has moved the school's way for two years running will either keep moving or it will not. Downey is betting her first year on the idea that a school families already trusted with an assistant principal will trust just as easily with a principal who never really left.

Enrollment counts come from the Alabama State Department of Education. Prekindergarten is excluded from every count and comparison in this article; Alabama's enrollment file carries a separately reported prekindergarten count through 2023 and stops publishing it in most schools' totals starting in 2024, so comparing years across that boundary would show a change in what was counted as though it were a change in how many children enrolled.

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

Blount County: 3.2% Chronic Absenteeism, Alabama's Attendance Champion

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In Alabama, where 12.05% of students were chronically absent in 2024-25, Blount County's rate was 3.18%.

The North Alabama district posted the lowest chronic absenteeism rate of any traditional school district in the state. The rate is an outcome reported in the Alabama State Department of Education's attendance data; that data does not identify which local practices produced it.

Blount County has been below the statewide average in every year Alabama has released chronic absenteeism data, starting in 2017-18. Not most years. Every year. Seven for seven. (The state published no 2019-20 file, so seven released years span eight school years.)

A model of consistency

What sets Blount County apart is not a single exceptional year but sustained performance across conditions that ranged from normal to catastrophic.

At its pandemic-era worst, a rate of 7.33% in 2022-23, Blount County was still well below the state average of 17.90%. Its highest figure in any released year is 15.74%, from 2017-18, and even that sat under the state's 18.28% that year.

The trajectory since the 2022-23 peak has been sharp: 7.33% to 4.18% to 3.18%, two consecutive years of improvement. That 3.18% is the district's lowest figure in any year except 2020-21, when Blount recorded 1.80% and the statewide rate fell to 8.27%.

What the district points to

Superintendent Rodney Green answered questions from The ALEdTribune in writing. He described attendance in Blount County as a long-standing habit rather than a recent program. "A culture that values good attendance has been cultivated in Blount County," Green wrote, crediting "the collective efforts of our schools, families, and community agencies."

Much of what he described is about how fast a family hears that a child is missing. "We have worked intentionally to improve communication with parents and families so that they are promptly informed of student absences and can work with schools to address attendance concerns," Green wrote. He said the district has also expanded student support services, "including additional nursing and mental health support, to address the needs of the whole child," and pointed to a partnership with the Helping Families Initiative, which he said provides "additional resources and support to help remove barriers that may impact student attendance, engagement, and success."

Green also said that part of what moved the reported figures was a change in how absences were written down. "Following the pandemic, we noticed a slight increase in our reported student absence rates," he wrote. "Through a careful analysis of our attendance data, we discovered that some tardies were inadvertently being coded as full-day absences." The district brought in Alabama State Department of Education PowerSchool coaches, who he said trained its student information system specialists and front desk staff so that "attendance codes were entered consistently and accurately." In his words, "This process has helped us improve the reliability of our attendance data and better identify students who may need additional support."

That account bears on how the drop from 7.33% to 3.18% should be read. The state's figures record what districts report, and a district that stops counting a tardy as a full-day absence lowers its reported rate whether or not any student's attendance changed. Neither the published data nor the district's account separates the part of the decline that came from cleaner coding from the part that came from students being in school more.

Strong attendance across subgroups

The subgroup data shows strong attendance across every subgroup Alabama published for the district in 2024-25:

English learners: 1.18%
Black students: 1.70%
Hispanic students: 1.83%
All students: 3.18%
White students: 3.46%
Economically disadvantaged: 4.06%
Special education: 5.26%
Multiracial students: 5.97%

Even the highest-rate subgroup, multiracial students at 5.97%, sits below half the statewide all-student rate of 12.05%. English learners had the lowest rate among Blount County's published subgroups, at 1.18%.

Green said the district has focused on its subgroups, attendance and achievement together, and he tied that work to the English learner figure. "We believe this intentional focus has had a positive impact on our English Learners and their academic progress," he wrote. He also pointed to the Blount County students recognized this year with the Alabama Seal of Biliteracy.

Among the best, the best

Twenty-seven Alabama districts have been below the state chronic absenteeism average in all seven years of available data. Blount County leads this group with the lowest 2025 rate.

The districts Blount County^↗ keeps in this consistency category are instructive. Mountain Brook City^↗ (3.25%), Marshall County^↗ (3.32%), and Winfield City (3.46%) are among the next-lowest rates. The list includes suburban districts like Vestavia Hills (5.75%) and Homewood (5.37%), but also smaller towns like Piedmont (6.45%) and Athens (7.71%).

Blount County is a rural county in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, north of Birmingham. The comparison is useful because the state's reported figures show the attendance outcome across districts with different sizes and contexts, but they do not establish why the rates differ.

What does 3.18% look like?

The published 3.18% rate applied to Blount County's 7,207-student enrollment produces a computed proxy of about 229 students. Because the rate is rounded, that is an estimate rather than a reported headcount.

This is the advantage of Blount County's rate: the number of students needing attention is small enough for a district to examine individual barriers. The state's reported figures do not show whether that kind of individual attention is happening. Green's written account describes it, in the form of a prompt call home and a route to a community partner, and the published data can neither confirm nor contradict him.

The state's data cannot identify what Blount County is doing differently, and the district's own account of the work is not testable against it. What the data does show is the outcome: Blount had the lowest rate among traditional districts in 2024-25 and was one of 27 districts below the state average in every released year. It ranked 47th of 137 traditional districts in the first 2017-18 file, so the current lead reflects a recent position within a longer record of above-average attendance.

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

Tamala Maddox Rises From Founding Principal to Head of Schools at i3 Academy

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The new leader of Birmingham's i3 Academy^↗ has already led both its middle and high schools. Dr. Tamala Maddox, who became the network's founding middle school principal and then led its high school, is now Head of Schools, the network's top administrative post.

"Serving as principal of i3 High School reinforced my passion for helping students succeed, and this new role gives me the opportunity to expand that impact across our entire network," Maddox wrote in response to questions from The ALEdTribune. "I was drawn to the Head of Schools position because it allows me to support more students, families, and educators while helping ensure each i3 Academy campus continues to grow and thrive."

The network she now oversees has been one of Alabama's steady growth stories. i3 Academy enrolled 912 students last school year, 2025-26, the most recent published enrollment data, up from 412 in its first reporting year of 2020-21, a gain of 500 students. Alabama's overall enrollment increased 0.3% across the same six reporting years when prekindergarten is excluded from every year's count. Every one of the network's five annual transitions in the state's records has been a gain.

Much of that climb is the network growing into itself. i3 opened as an elementary school, added a middle school, and later launched its high school at Jefferson State Community College's H.Y. Carson building, where students can earn dual college credit and professional certifications, according to Bham Now. New grades mean new students, and the network plans to keep adding a grade each year until it reaches a full grade span. The distinction matters for reading the numbers: this is enrollment built by expansion, and the expansion is not finished.

In 2025-26 the network's three campuses enrolled 408 students at the elementary school, 307 at the middle school, and 197 at the high school, where the oldest students that year were 10th-graders: 111 ninth-graders and 86 tenth-graders, with no students reported in the remaining upper grades that year.

A leader the network grew, too

The Hoover Sun reported when Maddox left Hoover City Schools that she taught math at Hoover High School before becoming an assistant principal and then principal at Bumpus Middle School. Before Hoover, she taught high school math in Georgia. Along the way she led both the Alabama Association of Middle School Principals and the Council for Leaders in Alabama Schools as president.

At i3, she became the network's founding middle school principal. When the network's high school opened, she became its principal, leading it through its first years on the Jefferson State campus. The Head of Schools role completes an arc the network's families have watched from the inside: the person now responsible for every i3 campus has personally opened or led most of them.

Asked what she carries from the high school into the systemwide role, Maddox pointed to relationships. "One of the most important lessons I've learned is that strong relationships are the foundation of successful schools," she wrote. "Building trust, maintaining open communication, and keeping students at the center of every decision will remain central to my leadership across the i3 Academy network."

Priorities: the fundamentals, at three campuses at once

Maddox's stated agenda for the school year underway is deliberately unflashy. "Our focus this year is simple: getting better at what matters most," she wrote. "That means strengthening high-quality teaching and learning, supporting student achievement, and creating positive school cultures where every student feels known, challenged, and prepared for success."

For a network mid-build, that focus has a specific operational meaning. Each fall brings a larger student body, a new top grade at the high school, and the staffing and culture work that comes with both. The Head of Schools job is to keep three campuses coherent while each one changes shape.

Maddox's message to families leans on partnership. "Families are essential partners in a child's education," she wrote. "When schools and families work together, students are more likely to succeed, and we look forward to strengthening those partnerships throughout the year."

The next milestones are already on the calendar: the remaining upper grades and eventually i3 Academy's first graduating class. The leader who opened the middle school those students passed through now runs the network they will graduate from.

Enrollment counts come from the Alabama State Department of Education.

Prekindergarten is excluded from every enrollment count and comparison because the state includes it in published totals in some years and omits it in others.

Correction, October 7, 2026: An earlier version reported a statewide enrollment decline of 2.1%. On a consistent basis excluding prekindergarten, statewide enrollment increased 0.3% over the same period. i3 Academy's enrollment figures are unchanged.

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

Montgomery County Cut Chronic Absence in 2024-25 but Remained Above 25%

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction: An earlier draft described the observed reporting span as the last four school years. This version names the years and treats 2024-25 as the most recent published data.

Montgomery County's chronic absenteeism rate fell 3.25 percentage points in 2024-25. Its 25.29% rate remained the highest among Alabama districts enrolling more than 10,000 students, and it has been above 25% in each of the four reporting years from 2021-22 through 2024-25.

The district's rate stood at 25.29% in 2024-25, more than double the statewide 12.05%. That is down from 28.54% the year before, an improvement of 3.25 percentage points that slightly outpaced the state's 2.79-point improvement over the same year. Across those four reporting years, the endpoint changed by 0.53 points, while the annual rates varied: 25.82% in 2021-22, 26.33% in 2022-23, 28.54% in 2023-24, and 25.29% in 2024-25, a net change of about half a percentage point.

Elsewhere the change has been much larger. Mobile County^↗ went from 30.93% to 12.81%, a drop of 18.1 points. Birmingham City^↗ fell 15.9 points, to 13.16%. Huntsville City^↗ is now at 8.23%, below the 11.41% it recorded in 2018-19.

The widening gap

Before the pandemic, Montgomery County^↗'s attendance figures were close to the statewide picture. Its 2018-19 rate of 11.95% sat 0.78 points above the state's 11.17%.

Chronic absenteeism rose sharply across Alabama in 2021-22. Montgomery's rate reached 25.82%, but so did Mobile's (30.93%) and Birmingham's (29.09%). The difference is what came next.

The gap between Montgomery and the state has widened from 0.78 points in 2018-19 to 13.24 points in 2024-25. Montgomery's rate is now more than twice the statewide figure, a disparity that did not exist before the pandemic.

This comparison begins in 2018-19. Alabama does not publish a 2019-20 figure in the data used here, and the panel resumes with 2020-21.

Among large districts

Fourteen Alabama districts enrolled more than 10,000 students in 2024-25. Montgomery has the highest chronic absenteeism rate of the fourteen, at 25.29%, more than 8 points clear of the next highest, Jefferson County^↗ at 16.97%.

Montgomery is also furthest from its own pre-pandemic level. It sits 13.34 points above its 2018-19 rate. The next largest such gap belongs to Jefferson County, at 6.50 points, and nine of the fourteen remain above where they were in 2018-19.

Nine of the fourteen large districts remained above their own 2018-19 rates in 2024-25, so recovery was uneven across the comparison group.

Those comparisons start from very different places. Shelby County^↗'s 0.54-point decline began at 11.59%, near the state average at the time. Madison County^↗ rose from 9.70% to 14.35%, which is still nearly 11 points below Montgomery's level. Montgomery began the span at 25.82%.

Inside the numbers

Within Montgomery, chronic absenteeism varies widely from one student group to another.

Students who are economically disadvantaged and students who receive special education services share the highest rate, both at 29.0%. Black students are at 28.2%. Nine of the ten student groups the state reports separately for Montgomery sit above the statewide all-student rate of 12.05%, including white students at 13.1% and English learners at 17.4%. The exception is Asian students, at 3.5%, who are below both the state's all-student rate and the state's rate for Asian students of 3.9%.

The published rates are elevated across several student groups. These outcome data do not establish a cause.

Thirteen percentage points above pre-pandemic

Montgomery County sits 13.34 percentage points above its 2018-19 rate of 11.95%. Statewide, the corresponding figure is 0.88 points.

The state improved by 2.79 points from 2023-24 to 2024-25. Montgomery improved by 3.25 points during that interval, but its published rate remained 13.34 points above its 2018-19 level.

Chronic-absence rates come from the Alabama State Department of Education’s Federal Report Card.

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

Special Education Graduation Rates Rose Nearly 12 Points in a Decade. The Gap Has Narrowed.

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction: An earlier version misstated the 2020 special education graduation rate. It was 69.6 percent.

Alabama's special education graduation rate was 66.6 percent in 2015. One in three students with disabilities who started high school did not finish with their cohort.

A decade later, the rate stands at 78.4 percent, the high for the data available from 2015 through 2025, and an 11.8 percentage point improvement that narrowed the gap with the overall graduation rate from 20.1 points to 13.2 points. The long-term change has been uneven. But the cumulative difference is real: 603 more special education students in the 2025 cohort graduated than would have at the 2015 rate.

The trajectory

The year-to-year path was not linear. The rate rose from 66.6 percent in 2015 to 69.6 percent in 2020, fluctuated through the pandemic years, and then rose another 4.9 points from 2023 to 2025.

The gap with the overall rate narrowed from 20.1 points in 2015 to 13.2 points in 2025. That is still a meaningful distance: the four-year graduation rate for students in special education remained lower than the rate for all students.

The 2023 crash spared special education

When Alabama's statewide graduation rate dropped 2.5 percentage points in 2023, special education was the only subgroup with a reported rate that improved. The rate ticked up from 73.1 percent to 73.5 percent, a half-point gain while the state average fell.

Every other subgroup with a reported rate fell. English learners fell 7.5 points. Students in foster care dropped 5.4 points. The overall rate suffered its worst single-year decline in the available 2015-2025 data. Special education kept climbing.

The data cannot say why special education avoided that one-year decline. It can only show that the subgroup moved differently from the statewide pattern at the moment when most other reported groups fell.

Cohort dynamics

The improvement happened alongside shifting cohort sizes. The special education graduating cohort grew from 4,537 students in 2015 to 5,123 in 2025, so the higher rate did not result from a smaller 2025 denominator.

What the data can and cannot say

Graduation-rate data can verify the direction, size, and timing of the change. It cannot isolate whether the improvement came from course-completion supports, individualized planning, credit recovery, reporting practices, or a mix of factors. No public source reviewed for this article directly attributes Alabama's special education graduation improvement to a specific statewide intervention.

The remaining gap

At 78.4 percent, Alabama's special education graduation rate still means more than one in five students with disabilities did not earn a diploma with their four-year cohort. The four-year rate measures completion with that cohort.

The 13.2-point gap to the overall rate, while smaller than it was a decade ago, remains the second-largest subgroup gap after foster care. Progress is real. The distance left to travel is still substantial.

By the numbers: 78.4%, Alabama's special education graduation rate in 2025, up from 66.6% in 2015. The gap to the overall rate narrowed from 20.1 percentage points to 13.2 percentage points.

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

Mobile County Cut Chronic Absenteeism by More Than Half in Two Years

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In 2022-23, nearly one in three Mobile County students was chronically absent. Two years later, in 2024-25, it was closer to one in eight.

Alabama's largest school system reduced its chronic absenteeism rate from 31.54% in 2022-23 to 12.81% in 2024-25, an improvement of 18.73 percentage points, cutting the rate by 59.4%. The two-year trajectory (31.54% to 17.91% to 12.81%) is the steepest sustained decline of any Alabama district enrolling more than 10,000 students.

Mobile County's 2024-25 rate is not just approaching pre-COVID levels. It has dropped below them. The district's 2018-19 baseline was 14.44%. At 12.81%, Mobile sits 1.63 percentage points better than where it stood before the pandemic disrupted everything.

From worst to near-average

The scale of the turnaround becomes clearer in context. In 2022-23, Mobile County^↗'s chronic rate of 31.54% made it one of the worst-performing large districts in Alabama, higher than Birmingham^↗ (23.35%), Montgomery County^↗ (26.33%), or Jefferson County^↗ (17.83%).

By 2024-25, Mobile sits at 12.81%, just 0.76 percentage points above the state average of 12.05%. A district that was once the attendance crisis of the state is now essentially average.

The improvement outpaces what other large districts achieved. Birmingham improved by 15.9 percentage points from its peak, impressive, but still less than Mobile's 18.7. Huntsville City^↗ improved by 10.6 points. Montgomery, by contrast, improved by just 1.0 point.

Every subgroup improved

What distinguishes Mobile's recovery is its breadth. Every major subgroup improved substantially from its 2022-23 level:

Economically disadvantaged students improved the most, dropping 20.5 percentage points (from 35.7% to 15.2%). Black students improved by 20.4 points (33.9% to 13.5%). White students improved by 17.4 points (30.4% to 13.1%).

Even English learners, who already had comparatively lower chronic rates, improved by 13.2 percentage points (19.6% to 6.39%). Hispanic students improved by 14.2 points.

Of those five groups, economically disadvantaged and Black students had the highest 2022-23 rates and also posted the largest absolute improvements. Mobile's recovery did not simply ride on its more affluent students getting back to school. The most affected populations participated in the turnaround.

What happened

Mobile's trajectory suggests something more deliberate than a natural regression to the mean. The district's rate was essentially flat from 2021-22 to 2022-23 (30.93% to 31.54%), and it was not gradually improving. Then it dropped 13.6 points in a single year, and another 5.1 the next.

That kind of sharp inflection point typically reflects a policy change, a leadership decision, or a systematic intervention rather than organic drift. Alabama's statewide strategies (the Helping Families Initiative, early warning systems, the shift from punitive truancy enforcement to school-based parent meetings) may have found particularly fertile ground in a large district with the infrastructure to implement them at scale.

The district's size works in its favor. With 47,366 students in 2024-25, Mobile County has the staff, data systems, and administrative capacity to identify chronically absent students early and deploy targeted interventions. Smaller districts in the Black Belt, facing similar or worse rates, often lack these resources.

The remaining gap

At 12.81%, Mobile's chronic absenteeism is not solved: applied to the district's 47,366 students, that rate works out to roughly 6,100 children missing 18 or more days of school in 2024-25. And within the district, subgroup disparities persist. Economically disadvantaged students remain at 15.22%, more than twice the rate of English learners at 6.39%.

But the district has demonstrated something that the broader data only hints at: that a large, high-poverty, majority-Black school system can not only recover from the pandemic attendance crisis, but surpass where it was before. Mobile County's pre-COVID rate of 14.44% was itself unremarkable. Its 2024-25 rate of 12.81% is meaningfully better.

Five of the 14 Alabama systems enrolling more than 10,000 students now sit below their 2018-19 chronic absenteeism rate. Mobile is the one that began the recovery with the highest rate of any of them and finished with the largest drop.

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

Hispanic Students in Alabama Have Lower Chronic Absenteeism Than White Students

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction (August 16, 2026): An earlier version attributed attendance differences to immigration, family culture, economic conditions and a reported threshold change without evidence that could establish those explanations. Those passages have been removed. The article now reports only findings reproduced from Alabama's published chronic-absence data.

Hispanic students in Alabama miss less school than white students, and they have done so in most years the state has published chronic absenteeism data.

Hispanic students have a chronic absenteeism rate of 9.87% in 2024-25, compared to 11.16% for white students, a gap of 1.29 percentage points in Hispanic students' favor. This is not a one-year anomaly. Hispanic students have had lower chronic rates than white students in five of the seven years Alabama has tracked the data.

The pattern holds at the district level too: in 96 of 132 districts with data for both groups (72.7%), Hispanic students are chronically absent at lower rates than their white peers.

A persistent pattern

The Hispanic-white gap has existed in Alabama's chronic absenteeism data almost from the beginning. In 2017-18, the first year of reporting, Hispanic students' rate was 6.06 percentage points lower than white students'. In 2018-19, the gap was 3.39 points.

The statewide rate fell from 18.28% in 2017-18 to 11.17% in 2018-19. The published rates alone do not establish what caused that break, so this analysis does not treat it as evidence of a behavioral change.

The pattern reversed in 2020-21 and 2021-22. In 2021-22, Hispanic students' rate was 15.93% while the white rate was 15.73%. By 2022-23, the Hispanic rate was lower again.

English learners, a largely overlapping population, have even lower rates. At 8.38% in 2024-25, English learners are the second-best-attending subgroup in Alabama, trailing only Asian students at 3.88%.

District examples

The statewide pattern appears in several districts with large gaps between the two reported groups. In Albertville, Hispanic students' rate was 12.2% versus 21.9% for white students, a 9.7 percentage-point gap. In Russellville, it was 5.94% versus 15.3%, a 9.3-point gap. Fort Payne reported 6.65% versus 12.3%, and Marshall County reported 2.29% versus 3.87%.

What the data can and cannot say

These are descriptive comparisons, not explanations. The aggregate records show which groups and districts have higher or lower published rates, but they do not identify the causes. Explanations involving language, family circumstances, school practice or local economies remain unresourced by this analysis.

The exceptions

The pattern is not universal. In 35 of 132 districts (26.5%), Hispanic students had higher chronic rates than white students, and in one district the rates were identical. The largest gaps in that direction were in Selma City (+10.5 points), Sheffield City (+9.7), and Macon County (+9.4). In Barbour County, both reported rates exceeded 45%.

But the dominant pattern is clear. In nearly three-quarters of Alabama districts, Hispanic students miss less school than white students, and at the state level they have done so in five of the seven years the state has published chronic absenteeism data.

Chronic absenteeism rates come from the Alabama State Department of Education's school data reports.

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

Alabama's Chronic Absence Rate Fell Again; Barbour County Moved the Other Way

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction: This article was revised before publication to remove unsupported explanations for Barbour County's attendance pattern, an estimate that combined separate data surfaces, and a statement about outreach that did not occur. The revised story reports only comparisons supported by current state data.

Alabama's chronic absenteeism rate improved for a second consecutive year in 2024-25. Barbour County^↗ moved sharply in the other direction.

The statewide rate fell from 17.90% in 2022-23 to 12.05% in 2024-25, a decline of 5.85 percentage points across two consecutive annual transitions. Barbour County's rate rose from 38.00% to 48.54% in the latest transition, an increase of 10.54 points.

That left Barbour's published rate about four times the statewide rate.

A statewide outlier

Barbour County had the highest chronic absenteeism rate among every published Alabama district-rate record for 2024-25. Its 48.54% rate was 11.12 points above Greene County^↗, the next-highest district at 37.42%.

The latest rate was also Barbour County's highest across the seven reporting years available in the package. The district's published series has moved sharply: 37.83% in 2021-22, 9.71% in 2022-23, then increases in each of the next two years to 48.54% in 2024-25.

Those values establish the volatility. They do not establish why the rate fell and rebounded, so the data does not support diagnosing the 2022-23 value as an error.

High rates across reported groups

The pattern extends across all seven Barbour County categories reported in the analysis. Published rates ranged from 45.16% for White students to 64.29% for students with special needs. The rate was 52.17% for Hispanic students, 49.92% for students who are economically disadvantaged, 49.13% for Black students, 48.54% for all students and 47.67% for English learners.

The analysis presents each category as its own published rate. It does not add the categories together or treat them as pieces of a single whole.

What the rates can and cannot show

The Alabama absence files used for this analysis publish rates but not usable district enrollment or chronic-absence counts. That means the data supports comparisons across years, districts and reported groups, but not an estimate of how many Barbour County students were chronically absent.

The clearest verified contrast is direction: Alabama's rate declined in both annual transitions from 2022-23 through 2024-25, while Barbour County's rate rose by 10.54 points in the latest year.

Chronic absenteeism rates come from the Alabama State Department of Education's school data reports.

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

Alabama Still Enrolls More Kindergartners Than Seniors, but the Margin Is Narrower

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction: This article was rewritten before publication to remove unsupported projections and externally sourced numbers. The revised analysis treats the 2025-26 grade counts as planning signals, not forecasts.

Alabama still enrolled more kindergartners than grade-12 students in 2025-26, but the difference was much smaller than at the start of the available state data. The state counted 55,329 students in kindergarten and 53,346 in grade 12, leaving a gap of 1,983.

That statewide balance can help leaders frame near-term questions about grade-level staffing and space. It cannot predict total enrollment on its own: kindergarten and grade 12 are different cohorts, and students can enter, leave or repeat grades between those endpoints.

A smaller statewide margin

In 2014-15, Alabama counted 57,138 kindergartners and 50,140 grade-12 students, a difference of 6,998. There were 114.0 kindergartners for every 100 grade-12 students. By 2025-26, that ratio was 103.7, a decline of 10.2 points across the available panel.

The gap narrowed in eight of the 11 annual transitions and widened in three. In the latest transition alone, it narrowed by 2,645 students. That mixed record matters: the long-run direction is toward a smaller margin, but the annual path has not moved in one direction every year.

The ratio is best read as a snapshot of the grades at opposite ends of the K-12 system. A ratio above 100 says the kindergarten count is larger in that reporting year. It does not establish when or whether the two grades will cross, and it does not show what will happen to the students between them.

Districts face different balances

The statewide result also hides local variation. Among 141 districts with positive published counts in both kindergarten and grade 12 in 2025-26, 47 enrolled fewer kindergartners than grade-12 students, 92 enrolled more, and two had equal counts.

Limestone County^↗ had 979 kindergartners and 1,612 grade-12 students, a difference of 633 in the other direction. Jefferson County^↗ had 2,300 kindergartners and 2,832 grade-12 students, a difference of 532.

Other large systems pointed the opposite way. Mobile County^↗ enrolled 3,694 kindergartners and 3,358 grade-12 students, 336 more at the entry grade. Montgomery County^↗ enrolled 2,206 kindergartners and 1,529 grade-12 students, a difference of 677.

Those district counts are not performance measures. They identify where the grade mix is different enough to merit a closer look at local class sections, staffing assignments and building use. The enrollment data alone does not identify the reasons for each district's balance.

Earlier and later grade bands moved differently

The broader K-12 grade spine shows the same planning tension without implying a forecast. From 2014-15 to 2025-26, K-5 enrollment decreased by 3,247 students and grades 6-8 decreased by 3,000. Grades 9-12 increased by 1,098.

These are observed cross-sections, not a projection of future graduating classes. Cohort movement, retention and student mobility can change the relationship as students progress through school. The useful question for state and district leaders is therefore narrower: whether the 2025-26 distribution of students matches where teachers, courses and classrooms are assigned.

Dr. Michael Sibley of the Alabama State Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment from The ALEdTribune before publication.

Enrollment counts come from the Alabama State Department of Education's school data reports.

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

Alabama's Black-White Absence Gap Was 5.3 Times Its 2019 Size

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction: An earlier draft incorrectly said the White chronic-absence rate recovered faster than the Black rate after 2022 and included district, raw-student, and causal claims the available data cannot support.

Alabama's statewide chronic absenteeism rate for Black students was 12.00% in 2019, compared with 11.37% for White students. The 0.63-percentage-point gap was small.

In 2025, the Black rate was 14.47% and the White rate was 11.16%. The 3.31-point gap was 2.68 points wider and 5.3 times as large as the 2019 gap.

The multiplier needs context: it is large partly because the 2019 denominator was a gap of less than one percentage point.

The full reported path

The state data include statewide rates for 2018, 2019, and 2021 through 2025. They have no 2020 row.

In 2018, the Black rate was 18.47% and the White rate was 19.21%, putting the Black rate 0.74 point lower. The gap then measured 0.63 point in 2019 and 1.01 points in 2021.

The gap reached 6.55 points in 2022, when the Black rate was 22.28% and the White rate was 15.73%. It narrowed to 4.77 points in 2023, widened slightly to 4.89 points in 2024, and narrowed to 3.31 points in 2025.

The 2021 rates are sharply lower than the surrounding reports. The available state records supply no verified coverage or waiver metadata, so this analysis treats 2021 as a reported discontinuity and does not use it to explain pandemic effects.

Black students improved more from 2022

From 2022 to 2025, the Black chronic-absence rate fell 7.81 points. The White rate fell 4.57 points. On that comparison, Black students improved more, and the racial gap narrowed by 3.24 points.

The baseline comparison answers a different question. Relative to 2019, the 2025 Black rate remained 2.47 points higher, while the White rate was 0.21 point lower.

Both statements can be true: the Black rate fell farther after 2022 but still ended farther above its 2019 level.

What the data cannot support

The absence surface reports rates without enrollment or chronic-absence counts. That prevents translating the 3.31-point gap into a number of students.

It also provides no district IDs or district subgroup denominators. Exact duplicate records and a remaining district-name collision make name-based ranks unsafe. District rankings, direction counts, and Black Belt, urban, suburban, or rural comparisons are therefore excluded.

Health disparities, housing instability, transportation, economic conditions, and pandemic disruption are unresourced as explanations in this analysis. The rates establish timing and disparity, not cause. The data also do not support projecting a date when the gap might close.

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

Alabama's White-Black Graduation Gap Ended Near Where It Began

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction: An earlier draft treated the annual gap as literally flat, overstated the district evidence, and used an incorrect estimate of the number of additional graduates implied by the gap.

In 2015, White students in Alabama posted an 88.3% graduation rate, compared with 84.2% for Black students. The difference was 4.1 percentage points.

In 2025, the White rate was 92.9% and the Black rate was 88.8%. The gap was 4.2 points.

Across that ten-year span, the White rate rose 4.7 points and the Black rate rose 4.6 points. The endpoint gap widened by 0.1 point after rounding, even though it moved up and down in the intervening years.

Eleven reports, a gap between 3.0 and 4.7 points

The annual White-Black gap averaged 3.9 points across the 11 reports from 2015 through 2025. It was narrowest in 2020 at 3.0 points and widest in 2023 at 4.7 points.

That variation matters. The evidence supports endpoint near-stasis across a decade, not a claim that the gap was unchanged every year.

The rates moved together, but not by equal amounts

White and Black graduation rates moved in the same direction in nine of the 10 year-over-year transitions. The exception was 2022, when the White rate fell 0.2 point and the Black rate rose 0.2 point. Their changes were not identical in the other years, either.

In 2023, the White rate fell 1.9 points while the Black rate fell 3.2 points. That widened the gap by 1.3 points. In 2024, the rates rose 1.5 and 2.6 points, respectively, narrowing the gap by 1.0 point. In 2025, the White rate rose 1.5 points and the Black rate rose 1.0 point, widening the gap by 0.5 point.

A count-backed counterfactual

The 2025 Black cohort included 16,756 students, of whom 14,875 were reported as graduates. Applying the exact White graduate share to the Black cohort produces a rate-equivalent of about 697 additional graduates.

Repeating that calculation with each year's exact cohort and graduate counts produces a sum of about 7,666 rate-equivalent graduates across the 11 cohorts from 2015 through 2025. This is a counterfactual benchmark, not a count of observed students who would necessarily have graduated under a particular intervention.

Only 17 districts met the comparison threshold

District-level rates were finite for both groups in only 17 districts with at least 20 students in each cohort. The White rate was higher in nine of those districts; the Black rate was higher in eight.

Chickasaw City had the largest absolute gap: its Black rate of 79.4% was 20.8 points above its White rate of 58.6%. Crenshaw County had the largest gap in the other direction, with an 88.7% White rate and a 74.1% Black rate, a 14.5-point difference. Mobile County's two rates differed by 0.1 point.

The limited reporting universe blocks broad conclusions about suburban, rural, or urban districts. Alabama's district rows also lack stable district IDs, so this analysis uses exact district names after removing exact duplicate cache records.

The Black gap was not the widest reported racial gap

Among five non-White race or ethnicity groups with finite statewide rates in 2025, the 4.2-point Black gap ranked second. The Pacific Islander gap was 6.0 points, based on a cohort of 130 students. The Asian rate was suppressed, so it is excluded from the ranked comparison.

What the data cannot explain

The graduation records establish the rates, gaps, cohorts, and reporting patterns. They do not identify why the gap remained near its starting level.

Career pathways, accountability policy, school leadership, residential segregation, school funding, and discipline are unresourced as mechanisms in this analysis. The fact that both rates moved in the same direction in nine of 10 annual transitions is suggestive context for shared statewide conditions, but it does not identify a cause.

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

English Learners Had Alabama's Second-Lowest Chronic Absence Rate in 2025

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction (July 21, 2026): An earlier version reported Alabama's 2022 and 2023 English learner chronic-absence rates as 13.82% and 12.91%. The state package returns 13.81% and 12.94%. The article also offered unsupported cultural, employment and community explanations for the attendance pattern and described demographic facts that this dataset does not measure. Those claims have been removed. The revised article reports only comparisons reproduced from Alabama's chronic-absence data, and its charts have been rebuilt from the current analysis.

English learners in Alabama had a chronic absenteeism rate of 8.38% in 2024-25, the second-lowest reported subgroup rate. Only Asian students had a lower rate, at 3.88%. English learners were below the statewide rate in all seven reported school years available in the package between 2017-18 and 2024-25.

English learners' 2025 rate was 3.67 percentage points below the all-student rate of 12.05%. It was also below the reported rates for white students (11.16%), Hispanic students (9.87%), economically disadvantaged students (15.31%) and Black students (14.47%).

Below the statewide rate in seven years

In 2017-18, the first year available in the package, the statewide rate was 18.28% and the English learner rate was 9.92%, a difference of 8.36 percentage points. In 2020-21, the English learner rate was 7.01%, compared with 8.27% statewide.

In 2021-22, the English learner rate was 13.81%, compared with 17.86% statewide. The English learner series then declined each year: 13.81% in 2022, 12.94% in 2023, 9.99% in 2024 and 8.38% in 2025.

Across the seven reported years, the English learner rate ranged from 1.26 to 8.36 percentage points below the statewide rate. From 2023 through 2025, the differences were 4.96, 4.85 and 3.67 points.

Almost universal across districts

In 110 of 120 districts that reported English learner chronic-absence rates in 2025 (91.7%), the English learner rate was below the district's overall rate.

In Russellville City, the English learner rate was 4.03%, compared with 9.07% overall. In Fort Payne City, it was 4.89%, compared with 10.39%. In Cullman County, it was 4.13%, compared with 10.66%.

In Bullock County, the overall rate was 35.65% and the English learner rate was 16.3%, 19.3 points below the district rate.

What the data cannot explain

The 2025 state rows show the highest chronic-absence rates among the listed subgroups for special education students (15.35%), economically disadvantaged students (15.31%) and Black students (14.47%). The package reports outcomes by subgroup; it does not identify why their rates differ. It cannot establish explanations about family motivation, work schedules, community norms, school services or individual barriers.

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

Alabama's Gender Graduation Gap Hit Its Narrowest Point in the Available Series

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction: This article was updated on Aug. 20, 2026, to clarify the comparison universe used to rank the male graduation-rate gain.

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

Alabama's male graduation rate reached 90.0 percent in 2025, its highest point in the available 2015-2025 series. The female rate rose to 93.1 percent. The gap between them, 3.1 percentage points, is the narrowest in that series.

That may not sound like headline material. A 3-point gap is small in absolute terms, and gender gaps in graduation rates rarely dominate education policy debates. But for a state where the gap had been as wide as 5.6 points as recently as 2017, the narrowing represents a meaningful shift: male students are improving faster than female students, and the gap is closing because of progress, not regression.

The pattern: males gaining, females steady

The story of Alabama's gender gap narrowing is almost entirely a story of male improvement. Males gained 5.5 percentage points over the decade, from 84.5 percent to 90.0 percent. Females gained 4.1 points, from 89.0 percent to 93.1 percent.

The gap has fluctuated: widening to 5.6 points in 2017 and 5.4 points in 2023, then narrowing. The 2023 widening coincided with a larger drop for males than for females. The 2025 closing paired a 2.1-point male gain with a 0.9-point female increase.

Male improvement ranked sixth among reported comparison groups

The 5.5-point male improvement over the decade ranks sixth among reported comparison groups with rates at both endpoints, behind English learners (+16.1), students receiving special education services (+11.8), multiracial students (+6.2), students who are economically disadvantaged (+6.0), and Hispanic students (+5.6). Males outpaced Black students (+4.6), white students (+4.7), and females (+4.1).

The 90 percent threshold is symbolically important. It places male students above the 2015 state average for all students (86.7 percent), meaning male graduates in 2025 performed better than the overall student body did a decade earlier.

What the data cannot explain

The state graduation series shows that the gap narrowed because the male rate rose more than the female rate. It does not identify a program, policy, or demographic change that caused the difference. Any explanation involving career pathways, credit recovery, cohort composition, or local practice remains unresourced in this analysis.

The next test

The latest year establishes a new low for the gap within the available panel, not a permanent change. Later cohorts will show whether the male rate holds near its latest level and whether the female rate continues to rise.

By the numbers: 3.1pp, the male-female graduation gap in 2025, the narrowest in the available 2015-2025 series. The male rate reached a series high of 90.0%, gaining 5.5 points over the decade.

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

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.

Marketa George Brings a Relationship Focus to Faine

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Dothan City Schools^↗ has named Marketa George the next principal of Jerry Lee Faine Elementary School, a 285-student campus where her first public message centered on belief, relationships and a high-quality school experience for every child.

Dothan announced George's appointment in May and said she brings more than two decades of experience in K-12 education and educational leadership to the district. In the official release Dothan City Schools provided to The ALEdTribune, George described the job less as a title change than as an opportunity to build on the school's culture.

"I hold a relentless belief in the limitless potential that our students have," George said.

That is the thread running through the release. George has worked as an educator, assistant principal, elementary school principal and instructional leader, and most recently founded KEYS Primary Academy in Hiram, Georgia, according to the district's release. Dothan described her background as including instructional development, school culture development, data-driven decision making and family-community engagement.

What George Is Naming First

George's language in the release is unusually direct about what she wants families to hear. She said she is excited to foster strong relationships with students, staff, families and the Jerry Lee Faine community. She also said "every child deserves a high quality educational experience no matter what."

Those are broad commitments, but at Faine they land in a specific setting. The school served 285 students in 2026. Its enrollment was unchanged from 2025 after a sharp drop from 393 students in 2024, according to Alabama State Department of Education enrollment data.

The decline should not be read as a verdict on the school or its students. It is the operating landscape George enters. Dothan's public elementary campuses are smaller than they were a decade ago, and Faine is now one of the district's smaller elementary schools. That makes the relationship work George named more concrete: in a smaller building, every family conversation, staff hire and classroom routine carries more weight.

A District Past Its Low Point

Dothan City enrolled 7,721 students in 2026, down 1,652 students from 2015, a 17.6% decline. The district's lowest point in the available enrollment window was 2023, when it enrolled 7,653 students. Since then, Dothan has been roughly stable, sitting 68 students above that low point in 2026.

That stabilization matters for a new principal. A district that has stopped falling, even modestly, can shift some attention from absorbing loss to strengthening the student and family experience that keeps people connected to the system. George's release does not promise an enrollment turnaround. It emphasizes culture and student potential, which are the levers a building leader can actually touch.

The student context at Faine also underscores why her emphasis on belonging cannot be generic. In 2025, Faine reported 93.7% Black enrollment and 97.5% economically disadvantaged enrollment. It also reported 21.8% special education enrollment. The state data rows for race and service categories overlap, and the economically disadvantaged and special education series carry methodology notes, so those figures are best read as current context rather than clean long-term trends.

The Board's Bet

Dothan's release said George was approved during a May board meeting. Superintendent Dr. Garrick Askew described her as a leader with a passion for student success and a commitment to positive school communities. The release also cited her degree work at Capella University, Central Michigan University and the University of West Georgia, and said she is a Certified Instructional Leader.

Those details matter because they point to a principalship built around school culture as much as operations. George's stated focus is not a new program, a slogan or a metric. It is the daily work of making students, staff and families believe the school is organized around their success.

The question ahead for Faine is how that message becomes visible. For families, it may show up in communication and trust. For teachers, it may show up in support and consistency. For students, it may show up in whether the adults in the building see ability before they see obstacles.

That is also why the district's emphasis on George's background in teacher development and family-community engagement matters. A principal's most public work often happens at meetings and events, but the durable work happens in the repeatable routines of a school: how teams look at student work, how families hear from the building before something goes wrong, and how staff members know which goals matter most. George's release suggests she wants those routines to be built around belief and consistency.

The district response for this article came from Karris Harmon, Dothan City Schools' Public Relations Officer, who provided the official release on George's behalf. Data in the charts comes from the Alabama State Department of Education's reports and data.

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

Aundria Sewell Steps Into Beverlye With a Culture-First Lens

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Dothan City Schools^↗ has named Aundria L. Sewell principal of Beverlye Intermediate School, placing an instructional leader with Montgomery experience at a campus that served 335 students in 2026.

The district announced the appointment as part of a broader set of new principal contracts approved in April. Sewell currently serves as principal of Dannelley Elementary School in Montgomery, where Dothan said she led school improvement efforts through data-driven instruction, strategic planning and high expectations for students and staff.

"Leading is not about having all the answers," Sewell said in the district release. "It's about building a school environment where students are learning, teachers are growing, and staff are supported."

That sentence is the center of the transition. Sewell is not describing leadership as personality or command. She is describing it as an environment: one where adult growth and student learning are connected.

A School Culture Assignment

Dothan's release described Sewell as bringing a background in instructional leadership and professional learning. It said she previously served as an assistant principal and instructional leader, has been recognized as a National Presenter at the Model Schools Conference and is known for building collaborative school cultures.

Those are the kinds of credentials that matter in an intermediate school. Beverlye sits in the middle years, where students are old enough to need independence and young enough to need a school culture that teaches habits as much as content. Sewell's quote points to that balance: students learning, teachers growing, staff supported.

Beverlye's current reporting line in the Alabama enrollment data begins in 2020, when the school enrolled 585 students. By 2026, it enrolled 335 students, a decline of 250 students, or 42.7%. The 2026 count was seven students above 2025, a small uptick after several years of contraction.

The older package rows use a Beverlye Magnet School label before the current Intermediate line begins. For this article, the chart stays with the current reporting line rather than merging two labels and risking a false sense of continuity.

The District Around Beverlye

Dothan City as a whole has been through a similar enrollment shift, though not as steep as Beverlye's current line. The district enrolled 7,721 students in 2026, down 1,652 students from 2015, a 17.6% decline. Its low point in the available window came in 2023, when enrollment reached 7,653. By 2026, the district was 68 students above that low point.

For a principal, that context is not abstract. Enrollment shapes staffing, schedules, course offerings and the amount of flexibility a school has when it tries to add support. Sewell's focus on teachers and staff is relevant because the adult side of a school has to stay steady even when the student count changes.

The 2025 student context rows show why that steadiness has to be practical. Beverlye reported 73.5% Black enrollment, 17.1% white enrollment and 8.8% Hispanic enrollment. The school also reported 90.2% economically disadvantaged enrollment, 23.2% special education enrollment and 5.2% limited English proficiency. Race and service categories overlap, and the economically disadvantaged and special education rows carry state methodology notes, so these figures describe the current context rather than a clean trend line.

What The Appointment Signals

Superintendent Dr. Garrick Askew said in the same Dothan release that the new principals bring proven experience, leadership and a shared commitment to student success. For Sewell, the district's case is that her experience with school improvement and professional learning fits Beverlye's next chapter.

That is a constructive bet. The data shows a smaller school than Beverlye was at the start of its current reporting line, but it also shows a campus with a clear student profile and a district that has moved slightly above its recent low point. Sewell's own words suggest she sees leadership as building conditions, not issuing answers from above.

The practical question is what those conditions look like by the time students and staff settle into the coming school year: the routines teachers can rely on, the support staff can feel, and the learning environment students experience every day.

That is the kind of work that can be easy to miss from outside a school and impossible to miss from inside one. Beverlye's next chapter will depend less on a single announcement than on whether students encounter steady expectations, whether teachers have useful feedback, and whether families see the school as organized and reachable. Sewell's release frames those pieces as connected, not separate.

The district response for this article came from Karris Harmon, Dothan City Schools' Public Relations Officer, who provided the official release on Sewell's appointment. Data in the charts comes from the Alabama State Department of Education's reports and data.

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

Conecuh County: From 74.6% to 92.0%, a Rural Turnaround Worth Studying

Tue, 23 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

Correction (July 20, 2026): An earlier version misstated Conecuh County's graduation rates for the early 2020s and the shape of its recovery. Alabama did not report a rate for the district in 2020, and the figures for the following two years were corrected against the state's published data. The trajectory description has been updated accordingly. The central finding, a rise from 74.6 percent in 2015 to 92.0 percent in 2025, is unchanged.

Conecuh County^↗ is a small rural district in south-central Alabama. Low income. Predominantly African American. The kind of place that shows up in education data as a problem to be solved.

In 2015, it graduated 74.6 percent of its seniors. In 2025, it graduated 92.0 percent.

That 17.3 percentage point improvement ranks among the largest in the state over the past decade. Conecuh County now exceeds the statewide average of 91.6 percent, a turnaround so complete that the district has crossed from the bottom tier to the top half without anyone much noticing.

The trajectory

The improvement was not sudden. Conecuh County's rate climbed through the late 2010s, from 74.6 percent in 2015 to 84.0 percent by 2019. Alabama did not report a district graduation rate for Conecuh in 2020, one of two recent years the state left the district's rate blank.

When the rate returns in the data, it is higher, not lower: 88.0 percent in 2021 and 92.2 percent in 2022. Where many districts saw COVID-era gains evaporate, Conecuh County's climb held. After a 2024 reading of 89.8 percent, the district posted 92.0 percent in 2025.

That the improvement did not reverse when pandemic-era grading flexibilities expired is what separates Conecuh County from districts whose gains faded. Something structural changed.

Among the biggest improvers statewide

Conecuh County's 17.3-point improvement places it among the top 10 most improved districts in Alabama from 2015 to 2025. In a state where many rural districts, particularly in the Black Belt, are moving in the opposite direction, Conecuh County stands out as proof that geography is not destiny.

The small-district caveat

Conecuh County graduates a small cohort each year. At that scale, individual students have an outsized impact on the percentage. A class of 50 where three additional students graduate shifts the rate by 6 points.

This matters for interpreting any single year's number. But the 11-year trend, from 74.6 to 92.0, spans enough cohorts and enough time to reflect something more durable than statistical noise. The direction is clear even if any single data point carries wide uncertainty.

The question for the state

Rural turnaround stories are rare. Urban districts get attention, resources, and reform mandates when their numbers fall. Rural districts, particularly small majority-Black districts in the Deep South, tend to get written off, their struggles attributed to structural factors that no school improvement plan can fix.

Conecuh County's numbers say otherwise. A 17-point improvement in a decade, sustained through the post-COVID correction, in a district that shares the same demographics and poverty as its struggling neighbors, that is worth understanding.

By the numbers: 92.0%, Conecuh County's 2025 graduation rate, up from 74.6% in 2015. A 17.3 percentage point improvement that has lifted a rural district above the state average.

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

Hispanic Students: From the Series' Widest Gap to Near-Parity in Two Years

Tue, 16 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

Correction (July 21, 2026): An earlier version misstated Alabama's 2020 Hispanic graduation rate as 91.5 percent and the white-student decline in 2023 as 1.7 percentage points. The state data report 90.6 percent and a 1.9-point decline, respectively. The article now limits record claims to the 2015-through-2025 package series and distinguishes the reported subgroup patterns from explanations the data cannot establish.

In 2016, the white-Hispanic graduation gap in Alabama was 0.9 percentage points, functionally zero. By 2023, it had widened to 6.1 points, the largest in the dataset. In 2025, it stands at 1.8 points.

Across the package's 2015-through-2025 series, the gap moved from near-parity to its widest point and back to near-parity. Hispanic students reached a series high of 91.2 percent in 2025, compared with the white rate of 92.9 percent.

The swing

The gap narrowed in the mid-2010s as Hispanic graduation rates climbed from 85.6 percent in 2015 to 90.6 percent by 2020. Then the 2023 change included a 4.3-point drop for Hispanic students that widened the gap to 6.1 points. Across 2024 and 2025, the Hispanic rate rose to 91.2 percent, surpassing the prior series high.

The sequence is volatile, but the graduation-rate series does not identify its cause. It shows when rates moved; it does not show which policies, services, or cohort changes produced those movements.

A growing population

Alabama's reported Hispanic graduating cohort grew from 1,896 students in 2015 to 5,263 in 2025. That growth means the swings occurred in an expanding reported cohort, though the aggregate series alone cannot separate changes in student composition from changes in school performance.

What the data do not explain

Alabama's package publishes Hispanic and English learner results as separate subgroup series, not a cross-tabulation. These data therefore cannot establish how much the groups overlap or attribute the Hispanic trend to English learner services.

The 2023 change, in which the Hispanic rate fell 4.3 points while the white rate fell 1.9 points, was uneven. It does not identify a policy mechanism. Likewise, the recovery to a new series high in 2025 documents an outcome, not proof that a particular approach caused it.

By the numbers: 91.2%, Alabama's Hispanic graduation rate in 2025, the high point in the 2015-through-2025 package series. The white-Hispanic gap narrowed to 1.8pp after peaking at 6.1pp in 2023.

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

Students Who Are Homeless Hit 86.3%: Their Highest Rate in Alabama's 2015 Through 2025 Data

Tue, 09 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

Correction (July 21, 2026): An earlier version reported the 2025 gap between the statewide graduation rate and the English learner rate as 8.3 percentage points. Recalculation from Alabama's unrounded published rates gives 8.2 points. It also attributed the different trajectories of students who are homeless and students in foster care to support structures that this dataset does not measure. That explanation has been removed. The article's central finding about students who are homeless is unchanged.

The graduation rate for students who are currently homeless in Alabama hit 86.3 percent in 2025, the highest mark in the state's 2015 through 2025 graduation-rate series and 5.2 percentage points below the state average. Four years ago, the rate was 74.3 percent and the gap was 16.4 points.

The rate improved by 12 points from 2021 to 2025.

The trajectory

The graduation rate for students who are currently homeless followed a distinctive pattern: 81.1 percent in 2015, 77.3 percent in 2017, 81.3 percent in 2020, then a collapse to 74.3 percent in 2021, the lowest point in the dataset. The recovery started the next year, but it was uneven: 77.1 percent in 2022, 76.4 percent in 2023, 82.2 percent in 2024 and 86.3 percent in 2025.

The climb from 74.3 percent to 86.3 percent occurred across several annual changes, not in a single year. The rate increased in three of the four years after the 2021 low.

The gap reached its narrowest point

The distance between students who are currently homeless and the state average has narrowed from a peak of 16.4 percentage points in 2021 to 5.2 points in 2025. At 5.2 points, the homeless gap is now smaller than the special education gap (13.2pp), smaller than the English learner gap (8.2pp), and vastly smaller than the foster care gap (29.2pp).

A contrast with foster care

Their trajectories since 2019 moved in opposite directions. Students who are currently homeless improved 8.5 points. Students in foster care declined 14.6 points. That is a 23.1-point divergence between the two changes. The graduation-rate data does not identify why the groups moved differently.

What the data cannot show

The state graduation-rate series measures outcomes, not the programs, school practices or individual circumstances that produced them. It establishes the size and timing of the rebound, but it cannot identify which interventions contributed to the change.

By the numbers: 86.3%, the graduation rate for students who are currently homeless in Alabama in 2025, up from a 2021 low of 74.3%. The gap to the state average has narrowed from 16.4pp to 5.2pp.

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

30 Alabama District-Level Entities Enroll Fewer Than 1,000 Students

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction: This article was rebuilt from the state enrollment record. The earlier version included a charter-versus-legacy split and related projections that the article's data package could not reproduce.

Linden City^↗ enrolls 399 students. Its eighth grade has 19 students, and five of its 13 K-12 grades have fewer than 30. The median grade enrolls 32.

Linden is one of 30 Alabama district-level entities below an editorial threshold of 1,000 students in 2025-26. That is 19.4% of the 155 entities with a positive district total. In 2014-15, six of 136 were below the same line, or 4.4%.

The threshold is a way to compare system scale, not a state policy line or a finding that a district is unsustainable. Enrollment figures alone do not identify the staffing, finance, governance, or program choices available to any individual system.

Many systems, a small student share

The 30 entities together enroll 18,569 students, or 2.6% of Alabama's published statewide total of 714,363. Their share of district-level entities is therefore much larger than their share of students.

That distinction matters when reading the statewide count. The package identifies district-level entities and their enrollment, but it does not provide a field that cleanly separates charter schools, specialty academies, county systems, and city systems. This article therefore reports the package's full district-level universe without assigning entities to unsupported categories.

The size distribution also puts the cutoff in context. Twenty more district-level entities enroll at least 1,000 but fewer than 1,500 students. Moving the editorial line would change the count, which is why the analysis tests several alternatives instead of treating 1,000 as a natural boundary.

Ten established systems crossed the line

Ten stable district IDs were at or above 1,000 students in 2014-15 and below 1,000 in 2025-26. That endpoint comparison excludes entities without a positive published total at both ends of the panel.

Linden City moved from 553 students to 399, a loss of 154 students, or 27.8%. Its grade-level distribution shows what that scale means without implying what the district should do: one unusually large or small cohort can materially change the shape of a system with only a few dozen students in many grades.

The full panel also shows that crossings are not always permanent. Some systems moved below the line and later returned above it. The endpoint count describes where systems stood in 2025-26; it is not a forecast of what comes next.

The data can establish the changing distribution and the scale of each system. It cannot, by itself, establish why a district lost or gained students, whether a threshold has operational consequences, or which local response is appropriate. Those questions require evidence from the communities and leaders behind the totals.

Enrollment counts come from the Alabama State Department of Education's school performance and reporting resources.

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.

Half of Limestone County's Students Are Virtual

Wed, 27 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Limestone County^↗ reports 16,633 students in 2025-26, nearly double its enrollment from a decade ago. On paper, it is one of only two Alabama districts with an 11-year unbroken growth streak. But 8,307 of those students have never set foot in a Limestone County school. They attend Alabama Connections Academy, a statewide virtual school operated by Pearson that happens to be administratively housed in the district. Strip out the virtual enrollment, and Limestone County's traditional schools serve 8,326 students, a number that has actually declined by 342 since 2014-15.

The same pattern repeats in two other districts. Eufaula City^↗ reports 8,619 students, up 213.0% since 2014-15. Three-quarters of them are virtual. Chickasaw City^↗ reports 3,387, up 263.0%. More than 70% are virtual. Alabama's three fastest-growing districts by percentage are, in reality, administrative hosts for statewide virtual schools run by two publicly traded corporations.

The 17,203-student question

Alabama's three statewide virtual schools collectively enrolled 17,203 students in 2025-26, representing 2.4% of the state's 714,363 total enrollment. That figure has grown sixfold since 2018-19, when only Alabama Virtual Academy at Eufaula reported statewide virtual enrollment of 2,832.

The growth accelerated after COVID-19 normalized remote instruction. Alabama Connections Academy, a Pearson-operated program, first appears in the state enrollment data in 2020-21 with 4,451 students and reached 8,307 in 2025-26. Alabama Virtual Academy, operated by Stride (formerly K12 Inc.), grew from 2,832 students in 2018-19 to 6,499 in 2025-26. Alabama Destinations Career Academy, also a Stride school, first appears in the data in 2021-22 with 1,644 students and has grown to 2,397.

These students attend school from anywhere in Alabama. But because each virtual school is chartered under a local district, the enrollment counts as that district's headcount for state reporting purposes. The result: three small districts carry enrollment figures that bear little relationship to their actual brick-and-mortar student populations.

Who's behind the growth

Both operators are subsidiaries of publicly traded companies. Alabama Connections Academy is a division of Connections Education LLC, part of Pearson, the British education conglomerate. Alabama Virtual Academy and Alabama Destinations Career Academy are programs of Stride Inc., which reported $2.41 billion in revenue for fiscal 2025, a 17.9% increase over the prior year. Stride's Alabama Virtual Academy has seen a 50% enrollment increase over five years, a pace the company characterizes as evidence that families view virtual learning as a "preferred, long-term path."

The virtual charter sector nationally is projected to grow from $5.76 billion in 2025 to $14.41 billion by 2032, a 14% compound annual growth rate. Alabama is one of the states where that growth is most visible.

What the traditional numbers show

The gap between reported and actual enrollment is stark. Limestone County's reported total grew by 7,965 students since 2014-15. Its traditional enrollment fell by 342. Eufaula City's reported total grew by 5,865. Its traditional enrollment fell by 634. Only Chickasaw City saw any traditional growth at all: 57 students over 12 years.

For Limestone County's 14 traditional schools, enrollment peaked at 8,911 in 2016-17 and has drifted downward since, reaching 8,326 in 2025-26. The trajectory is indistinguishable from many rural Alabama counties. Eufaula City's four brick-and-mortar schools serve 2,120 students, down 23.0% from the 2,754 enrolled before the virtual school arrived. Chickasaw City's four traditional schools serve 990 students, roughly where they were a decade ago.

Statewide, 43 of 135 districts that operated in both 2014-15 and 2025-26 reported enrollment growth. After adjusting for virtual school enrollment, 41 still grew. The virtual distortion does not meaningfully change the statewide count of growing districts. It changes which districts top the list.

A performance gap

The academic question is whether these virtual schools deliver outcomes comparable to the traditional schools whose enrollment they inflate. Available performance data suggests they do not.

Alabama Connections Academy's math proficiency rate is 8%, compared to a state average of 30%. Its reading proficiency is 42%, versus a state average of 47%. The school ranks in the bottom 50% of all Alabama schools for overall test scores. Alabama Virtual Academy at Eufaula shows a similar pattern: 7% math proficiency and 38% reading proficiency.

These proficiency gaps are not unique to Alabama. National research on virtual schools has consistently found lower academic performance than brick-and-mortar counterparts. Whether that reflects the schools themselves, the student population they attract, or both, remains contested. Virtual schools often serve students who struggled in traditional settings, which makes direct comparison difficult.

The accountability question

The structural arrangement raises a tension that Alabama has debated before. The Alabama Association of School Boards warned in 2016 that statewide virtual schools would "pull students and funding from all over the state," circumventing local control protections established in 2015 legislation. The association argued that existing law required local school systems to maintain "protocol for participation, monitoring, test-taking and all of the supports and guidance that is critical for students to succeed."

"National data shows allowing statewide open-enrollment at virtual schools is a bad idea." -- Alabama Association of School Boards, 2016

That warning predated the current scale. In 2016, statewide virtual enrollment was negligible. Today, 17,203 students enroll through three virtual schools, all of them operated by for-profit companies and all of them housed in districts that contribute a fraction of the students they serve. The host districts receive state funding based on total enrollment, including virtual students, while the actual instruction is delivered by the corporate operator.

The new funding formula

Alabama's new RAISE Act, which took effect in June 2025, shifted the state toward weighted student funding that allocates more resources for students in poverty, English learners, and students receiving special education services. How virtual students are weighted under the new formula could reshape the incentive structure for host districts. If virtual students carry lower weights than the specialized populations they often serve, the financial calculus for hosting a statewide virtual school may change.

The more immediate question is whether enrollment data consumers, from state legislators to local school boards to researchers, understand that Alabama's top three growth districts are growth districts in name only. Limestone County's 11-year growth streak is real in the data. It is not real in the hallways.

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

English Learners Made a 15-Point Leap in Two Years, the Fastest Improvement of Any Group

Tue, 26 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Alabama Graduation Rates: 2023 Crash · Birmingham · CCR Gap · Foster Care · English Learners · Montgomery · Nine Records

In 2023, the graduation rate for Alabama students who are English learners sat at 67.9 percent, roughly 20 points below the state average. About one in three students who are English learners and who started high school that year did not finish with a diploma.

Two years later, the rate stands at 83.3 percent, an all-time high for the group. That is a 15.4 percentage point gain in two years, the fastest rise of any subgroup in the state over any two-year period in the data.

The improvement was not gradual. It came fast, and it raises as many questions as it answers.

The trajectory

The rate has been on a volatile ride. It climbed from 67.3 percent in 2015 to 76.5 percent in 2020, then slid back to 67.9 percent by 2023 as COVID-era supports expired. Students who are English learners saw the steepest single-year decline of any group in the 2023 correction, a 7.5-point drop, more than three times the statewide decline that year.

The 2024-2025 rebound erased the decline and then some. The 83.3 percent rate is 6.8 points above the previous high, and the gap to the state average has narrowed from about 19.5 points in 2015 to about 8.2 points in 2025.

Fastest improvement of any group

The 15.4-point two-year gain outpaced every other subgroup. Students in special education improved 4.9 points. Students who are economically disadvantaged gained 5.3 points. The overall rate gained 3.4 points. Students who are English learners improved at more than four times the statewide pace.

What could explain it

Several factors may have converged. Alabama has invested in dual-language programs and expanded instructional supports for students who are learning English, particularly in districts with growing immigrant populations like those in the poultry-processing belt of north Alabama. Federal accountability requirements under ESSA also pushed states to report and improve the graduation rate for English learners as a distinct indicator.

The 2023 dip and subsequent rebound also suggest that the temporary grading and attendance flexibilities of 2020-2022 may have masked underlying challenges for students who are learning English, which became visible in 2023 when those supports ended. The 2024-2025 gains may reflect schools adapting their support for English learners to a post-COVID reality rather than reverting to pre-COVID practices.

The cohort is also growing. The number of English learners in each graduating class has increased over the decade, which means the improvement is not an artifact of a shrinking denominator.

The volatility question

The same volatility that produced a 15-point improvement can produce a 15-point decline. The rate fell 8.6 points from 2020 to 2023, then rebounded 15.4 points over the next two years. Only a couple of other groups, including migrant and special education students, show comparable year-to-year swing.

The pattern suggests that the graduation rate for students who are learning English may be more sensitive to policy changes (grading flexibility, attendance policies, credit recovery access) than the rates for larger, more stable groups. If the 2025 rate reflects a lasting improvement in how schools serve these students, it should hold. If it reflects favorable conditions that could shift, the volatility will return.

By the numbers: 83.3% is the graduation rate for Alabama students who are English learners in 2025, up from 67.9% in 2023. The 15.4 percentage point two-year gain is the largest of any subgroup. The gap to the state average has narrowed from about 19.5pp to about 8.2pp.

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.

Montgomery's 17-Point Crash Was the Biggest in the State. Two Years Later, It's Still Not Back.

Tue, 19 May 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

In 2022, Montgomery County^↗ graduated 84.5 percent of its seniors. One year later, the number was 67.4 percent.

A 17.1 percentage point single-year crash, the largest of any Alabama district in at least a decade of records. In a single graduating class, the state capital went from slightly below the state average to 21 points beneath it. One in three Montgomery seniors did not receive a diploma.

Two years into a recovery effort, the rate stands at 80.4 percent. Better, but still 4.1 points below the pre-crash level and 11.2 points below the state average of 91.6 percent. Montgomery is the fourth-largest district in Alabama by graduating class size. Its 1,696 seniors make its graduation rate a statewide concern, not a local one.

What happened in 2023

The cohort count tells part of the story. Montgomery's graduating cohort jumped from 1,584 students in 2022 to 2,060 in 2023, a 30 percent increase in a single year. That kind of surge does not reflect population growth. It suggests a backlog: students who had been retained, delayed, or held back suddenly entering the four-year graduation window.

When a large number of students who were already off-track enter the denominator simultaneously, the rate collapses even if the absolute number of graduates stays flat or increases. Montgomery appears to have experienced exactly this, a cohort correction that exposed how many students were falling through cracks that the previous numbers had papered over.

The recovery is incomplete

Montgomery gained 12.0 percentage points in 2024 and another 1.0 point in 2025, climbing from 67.4 percent back to 80.4 percent. The cohort has normalized to 1,696 seniors in 2025, down from the 2,060 anomaly. But the recovery has stalled well short of the pre-crash level.

At 80.4 percent, Montgomery graduates a lower share of its students than 129 of Alabama's 143 districts. It sits just above Birmingham City (81.0 percent) and well below other urban districts like Huntsville (88.2 percent) and Mobile County (86.5 percent).

The subgroup picture

Montgomery's graduation challenges cut across demographics. No subgroup in the district exceeds the statewide average. The district's overall rate of 80.4 percent masks significant variation, but the variation is between groups that are below the state average and groups that are far below it.

Not just Montgomery

Montgomery's 2023 crash was the most dramatic, but it was not unique. Several Alabama districts saw significant drops that year as COVID-era grading flexibilities expired statewide. The pattern suggests that the elevated 2020-2022 rates, which appeared to show pandemic resilience, may have been partially inflated by temporary policies rather than genuine improvement.

Montgomery just happened to have the largest correction.

By the numbers: 67.4%, Montgomery County's 2023 graduation rate, down 17.1 points from 84.5% the prior year. The district has recovered to 80.4% but remains 11.2 points below the state average.

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

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.

Alabama's Hidden Revolution: The Diploma Quality Gap Collapsed in a Decade

Tue, 12 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Alabama Graduation Rates: Nine Records · 2023 Crash · Birmingham · Foster Care · CCR Gap

Ten years ago, Alabama had a graduation problem hiding inside a graduation success story. The state graduated 87 percent of its students in 2015, a respectable number by any measure. But only 38 percent of those graduates met college or career readiness benchmarks. Nearly half the diplomas the state handed out led nowhere.

By 2025, that gap has all but vanished.

Alabama's four-year graduation rate stands at 91.6 percent, the second-highest in the state's history. Its college and career readiness rate has reached 87.9 percent, an all-time high. The distance between the two numbers (once a 48.7 percentage point chasm) has narrowed to 3.7 points. The diploma, in other words, finally means something close to what it claims.

What the numbers actually show

The CCR rate measures the share of graduates who complete requirements beyond seat time: industry credentials, qualifying ACT scores, AP course completion, or career-technical education pathways. In 2015, Alabama set that bar and discovered most of its graduates couldn't clear it.

A definition change between 2015 and 2016 makes direct comparison across that break unreliable. The CCR rate jumped from 38.0 percent to 63.7 percent in a single year, almost certainly reflecting an expanded definition of what counts as "ready" rather than a sudden improvement in student preparation.

But even taking the more conservative 2016-2025 window, the trajectory is striking. The CCR rate climbed from 63.7 percent to 87.9 percent, a 24.2 percentage point improvement in nine years. That is not a measurement artifact.

The readiness revolution was broad-based

Every subgroup with reliable CCR data improved. Black students went from a 46.2 percent CCR rate in 2016 to 81.4 percent in 2025. Economically disadvantaged students climbed from 49.5 percent to 82.9 percent. Hispanic students rose from 56.4 percent to 85.7 percent.

The pattern is not one group dragging others along. It is convergence: the groups that started furthest behind made the largest absolute gains.

What drove it

Alabama invested heavily in career-technical education pathways over the past decade, expanding access to industry-recognized credentials and dual enrollment programs. The Alabama Ahead Act and related CTE expansions gave students more routes to demonstrate readiness beyond traditional college-prep metrics.

The structure of the CCR benchmark matters here. By counting industry credentials alongside ACT scores and AP completion, Alabama created a readiness measure that rewards vocational and technical preparation, not just college admission. In a state where many graduates enter the workforce directly, that alignment matters.

The asterisk

The 2023 crash year complicates the narrative. The statewide graduation rate dropped 2.5 percentage points that year (the largest single-year decline in the dataset) as COVID-era supports expired. But the CCR rate barely flinched, dipping only 0.5 points before resuming its climb. That divergence suggests the readiness improvements are more structurally durable than the graduation rate itself.

Still, a 3.7-point gap means roughly 2,100 students graduated in 2025 without meeting readiness benchmarks. The gap has narrowed dramatically, but it has not closed.

By the numbers: 87.9% of Alabama's 2025 graduates met college or career readiness benchmarks, up from 38.0% a decade ago. The gap between graduating and being ready for what comes next has shrunk from 48.7 percentage points to 3.7.

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Alabama Is 32,000 Students Below Its Pre-COVID Trajectory

Wed, 06 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Alabama's public schools enrolled 740,118 students in 2019-20. That was roughly where they had been for half a decade: fluctuating within a narrow band, never gaining or losing more than a percentage point in any direction. A linear projection through the 2015-2019 data produces a nearly flat trajectory, essentially forecasting enrollment would hold steady around 740,000.

If that trajectory had continued through the pandemic and beyond, Alabama would have 746,099 students in 2025-26. Instead it has 714,363. The gap between where Alabama was headed and where it actually landed is 31,736 students, and it has widened in five of the seven post-pandemic years.

A gap that only runs one direction

The divergence started small. In 2019-20, the gap between actual and projected enrollment was just 3,070 students. COVID blew it open: by 2020-21, the gap had quadrupled to 13,887. The 2021-22 school year brought a partial rebound, narrowing the gap to 8,350 as families returned to classrooms.

That was the last good news.

Since 2022, the gap has widened relentlessly. It jumped to 14,854 in 2022-23, then nearly doubled to 26,412 in 2023-24. By 2025-26 it had reached 31,736, or 4.3% below the projected trajectory. Each year Alabama falls further behind the line it was on before the pandemic arrived.

The year-over-year enrollment changes tell the same story from a different angle. After losing 10,332 students during the pandemic's first year, Alabama clawed back 6,022 in 2021-22. It has lost students in every year since. The 2023-24 loss of 11,073 was the largest single-year decline in the dataset, exceeding even the COVID year itself. The losses in 2024-25 (-1,243) and 2025-26 (-3,110) were smaller in absolute terms, but they came on top of a base that was already deeply eroded.

Alabama is now in a four-year decline streak, with enrollment at its lowest point in the 12-year dataset: 714,363. That is 35,534 fewer students than the 2015-16 peak of 749,897, a 4.7% decline.

Five districts account for most of the damage

The losses are not evenly distributed. Of 141 districts with data spanning 2020 to 2026, 110 lost enrollment, or 78%. But five districts account for 73.1% of the total state loss of 25,755 students since 2019-20.

Mobile County^↗ leads: 7,314 students lost since 2019-20, a 13.5% decline. Birmingham City^↗ lost 3,665 (16.0%). Montgomery County^↗ lost 3,516 (12.4%). Jefferson County^↗ lost 3,254 (8.9%). Shelby County rounds out the top five at 1,074 (5.1%).

The concentration of losses in Alabama's largest urban and suburban systems reflects a pattern visible across the South: big-district families have more exit options, whether private schools, charter schools, homeschooling, or migration to smaller systems nearby. Dallas County^↗, with 2,032 students remaining, has lost 29.3% of its enrollment since 2019-20, the steepest percentage decline among the top losers.

Where the students went

Three forces are pulling students out of Alabama's public schools, and they are difficult to untangle.

The CHOOSE Act, Alabama's education savings account program, launched in the 2025-26 school year. Of roughly 24,000 students awarded ESA funds, approximately 3,032 had previously attended public schools. That accounts for roughly half of the 2025-26 decline but only a small fraction of the cumulative 31,736 trajectory gap. Most CHOOSE Act recipients, about two-thirds, were already in private schools or homeschool programs before the program existed.

A second, murkier factor is the disappearance of students whose families appear to have left the state or withdrawn from formal schooling without notifying their districts. State Superintendent Eric Mackey told WSFA that of the 5,800 students who did not return in 2025-26, roughly half enrolled in private schools or homeschooling. The other half remains unaccounted for.

"We do believe that there is a group of students out there that may be homeschooling, but have not been accounted for because they haven't actually gone to their local school board and withdrawn and indicated that as their preference." -- State Superintendent Eric Mackey, WSFA, Oct. 2025

Superintendents across the state have reported that many of the unaccounted students are Hispanic. A new federal reporting form that allows students to select multiple racial identities has made it harder to parse what portion of the apparent Hispanic enrollment decline reflects actual departures versus reclassification. PARCA's analysis found reported Hispanic enrollment fell from 12% to 4% of students between 2024-25 and 2025-26, a drop of 56,196 students on paper. But the "two or more races" category surged by 52,627 students over the same period, absorbing most of the apparent decline. Alabama actually gained about 300 Hispanic students in net terms, according to the final count.

The third factor is demographic. Alabama's birth rates fell starting with the 2008 recession and never recovered. Deaths have outnumbered births for three consecutive years. Smaller kindergarten cohorts have been feeding into the pipeline for over a decade, and there is no rebound on the horizon.

Beyond recovery

The language of "COVID recovery" implies a return to normal. Alabama's data suggests the pandemic was not a disruption but a permanent break.

The state lost 10,332 students during COVID (2019-20 to 2020-21). In the five years since, it has not recovered a single one. Instead, it has lost an additional 15,423 students beyond the COVID low of 729,786. The recovery rate is not low. It is negative: -149%.

Put differently, the COVID drop was 10,332 students. The post-COVID decline has been roughly one and a half times larger.

The expected budget impact is approximately $30 million in reduced allocations for fiscal year 2027, with an estimated 500 education positions affected statewide. Alabama's new RAISE Act funding formula, which sets a base of $7,547 per student for 2025-26, means each student who leaves takes that funding with them.

What happens next

The CHOOSE Act is set to expand. Governor Ivey signed an amended budget that nearly doubled the program's initial funding from $100 million to $180 million in its first year. Eligibility remains income-limited for 2026-27, then expands to all Alabama K-12 residents in 2027-28. If more public school students take ESA funds in year two and beyond, the trajectory gap will widen further.

But the CHOOSE Act is a recent addition to a longer story. Alabama was losing students well before the voucher program existed. The 2023-24 loss of 11,073 students, the largest in the dataset, happened a full year before the first ESA dollar was spent. The underlying forces pulling enrollment down, declining births, outmigration, and a growing preference for alternatives to traditional public schools, were at work before the pandemic and have accelerated since.

The question for Alabama's 155 school districts is not when enrollment will return to pre-COVID levels. It is how to operate a system built for 740,000 students when fewer than 715,000 show up, and fewer arrive each year.

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Alabama's Foster Care Graduation Rate Is the Only One That Hasn't Recovered

Tue, 05 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Alabama Graduation Rates: Nine Records · 2023 Crash · Birmingham · Foster Care · CCR Gap

In 2025, nine Alabama student subgroups set all-time graduation rate records. Students in foster care moved in the opposite direction.

Their graduation rate has dropped from 77.0 percent in 2019 to 62.4 percent in 2025, a 14.6 percentage point decline over seven years. Of the 17 subgroups Alabama tracks, foster care is the only one with a net decline since 2019; every other group's rate is higher today than when reporting began. Students in foster care now graduate at a rate 29.2 points below the state average, the widest gap of any group tracked by the Alabama State Department of Education (ALSDE).

The state's overall graduation rate climbed during the same period. Students who are economically disadvantaged, English learners, students who are currently homeless, and students in special education all reached record highs. Youth in foster care did not.

The numbers year by year

From 77.0 percent in 2019, the rate dropped to 66.5 percent in 2020, held at 66.7 percent in 2021, ticked up to 69.0 percent in 2022, then fell again to 63.6 percent in 2023, 63.8 percent in 2024, and 62.4 percent in 2025. The cumulative shape is a sharp pandemic-era drop, a brief recovery in 2022, and a renewed slide that has not reversed.

The 2020 drop of 10.5 points was the steepest single-year change, coinciding with pandemic disruption that hit the most unstable housing situations hardest. But other groups posted similar pandemic-era losses and recovered; students in foster care did not. The post-2022 slide, in years when most other groups rebounded, points to structural failures beyond COVID.

Where foster care sits in the landscape

The 62.4 percent rate places students in foster care at the bottom of Alabama's subgroup rankings. Students in special education, the next-lowest group, graduate at 78.4 percent, 16 points higher. Students who are currently homeless, who face their own housing instability, graduate at 86.3 percent.

The comparison to students who are currently homeless is instructive. Both groups face residential instability, but students who are currently homeless in Alabama have improved sharply, from 77.8 percent in 2019 to 86.3 percent in 2025, an 8.5-point gain. Students in foster care, over the same period, fell 14.6 points. Whatever supports are reaching unhoused students are not reaching students in foster care.

The paradox: those who graduate are ready

There is one surprising data point in the foster care numbers. The gap between graduation rate and college/career readiness rate has collapsed to 1.8 percentage points: 62.4 percent graduate, and 60.5 percent are college or career ready. For comparison, the statewide CCR gap is 3.7 points.

This means that among students in foster care, nearly everyone who manages to graduate also meets readiness benchmarks. The problem is not quality of preparation for those who persist. The problem is that 38 percent of students in foster care never reach the finish line.

What the data cannot tell us

Foster care data only became available in 2019, limiting trend analysis to seven years. The cohort sizes are relatively small, which means individual students have an outsized impact on the rate: a district with 10 seniors in foster care where one drops out sees a 10-point swing.

The data also does not distinguish between students who aged out of the foster system during high school, those placed in new homes mid-year, or those who remained in stable placements. Research consistently shows that placement stability is the single strongest predictor of foster care graduation, but Alabama's data does not track it.

By the numbers: 62.4%, the graduation rate for Alabama's students in foster care in 2025, down from 77.0% in 2019. The gap to the state average has widened to 29.2 percentage points, the largest of any subgroup.

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.

Birmingham Has Been Stuck at 81% for a Decade

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Alabama Graduation Rates: Nine Records · 2023 Crash · Birmingham · Foster Care · CCR Gap

Birmingham City^↗ graduated 79.4 percent of its seniors in 2015. In 2025, the number is 81.0 percent.

A net gain of 1.6 percentage points over a decade in which the state improved by 4.8 points. Birmingham is not declining. It is stuck, treading water while the rest of Alabama swims past.

The state average now sits at 91.6 percent. Birmingham is 10.6 points below it, and the distance has widened. The city is also on a three-year decline streak: from 83.7 percent in 2022 to 83.0, then 81.1, then 81.0 in 2025. The gains of the late 2010s have been erased.

A decade of flatline

Birmingham's graduation rate has moved within a narrow band over the period covered by the data, dipping as low as 76.7 percent in 2017 and topping out at 83.7 percent in 2022, the COVID-era high that many districts hit. The rate has declined every year since 2022. The pre-COVID rate of around 80 percent appears to be the structural baseline, and the district has returned to it.

The 1.6-point net improvement over 11 years averages to 0.15 points per year. At that pace, Birmingham would need another 70 years to reach the current state average.

Compared to peer cities

Among Alabama's five largest urban districts, Birmingham ranks fourth in 2025 graduation rate. Huntsville City leads at 94.5 percent. Tuscaloosa City sits at 89.6 percent. Mobile County, the largest district in the state, graduates 86.0 percent of its seniors. Montgomery County, despite its 2023 crash, has recovered to 80.4 percent, nearly matching Birmingham at the bottom of the peer set.

The comparison to Huntsville is particularly striking. Both are major urban districts with significant poverty and racial diversity. But Huntsville's rate has climbed steadily into the mid-90s, while Birmingham has stagnated more than 13 points behind.

The shrinking cohort

Birmingham's graduating class has shrunk by 23 percent over the decade, from 1,671 seniors in 2015 to 1,288 in 2025. The district is losing students at every level, a reflection of population decline and competition from suburban districts.

A shrinking cohort should, in theory, make improvement easier: fewer students means more resources per student, more individualized attention. That it has not translated into graduation gains suggests the challenges Birmingham faces are deeper than student-to-teacher ratios.

The subgroup view

No subgroup within Birmingham exceeds the statewide average. The district's overall rate of 81.0 percent sits well below the state mark across every category. The gap is a systemic issue, not a story of one group dragging the average down.

By the numbers: 81.0%, Birmingham City's 2025 graduation rate, up just 1.6 points from 79.4% in 2015. The state improved 4.8 points over the same period, widening the gap to 10.6 points.

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

Alabama Recovered to Its Second-Highest Graduation Rate Ever After the 2023 Dip

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Alabama Graduation Rates: Nine Records · 2023 Crash · Birmingham · Foster Care · CCR Gap

Alabama's statewide graduation rate dropped 2.47 percentage points in 2023, from 90.68 percent to 88.21 percent, the largest single-year decline in at least a decade of data. Every subgroup declined except special education. The crash was not a data error or a methodology change. It was the correction that happens when temporary supports get pulled.

Two years later, the state has fully recovered. The 2025 rate of 91.56 percent is the second-highest on record. But the 2023 episode reveals something important about the three preceding years: how much of the elevated 2020-2022 rates was real, and how much was inflated by policies that could not last.

Who was hit hardest

The crash was not distributed equally. English learners dropped 7.5 percentage points in a single year, the steepest decline of any group. Students in foster care fell 5.4 points. Native American students dropped 4.9 points. Hispanic students fell 4.3 points.

The groups hit hardest were, without exception, the same groups that had benefited most from COVID-era flexibility in attendance, grading, and credit recovery. When those policies expired, the students who needed them most saw their graduation prospects collapse.

Special education was the lone exception, improving half a point while everyone else fell. Students in special education operate under individualized graduation plans that are less affected by blanket policy changes.

The recovery was uneven

Not everyone bounced back. English learners surged 15.4 points over the next two years, a dramatic overcorrection that suggests the 2023 dip was partly a timing anomaly. The overall rate gained 3.4 points. Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students recovered their losses and set new records.

But students in foster care did not recover. Their rate continued to decline from 63.6 percent in 2023 to 62.4 percent in 2025. The 2023 drop was not a temporary setback for young people in foster care. It was another step down in a sustained downward trajectory.

The district picture

The crash was widespread but not universal. The majority of Alabama districts saw their rates decline in 2023, but some held steady or improved. The distribution of changes shows a clear downward pull: the median district change was negative, and the most extreme declines reached double digits.

Montgomery County's 17.1-point collapse was the most dramatic outlier, but dozens of districts experienced drops of 5 points or more.

What the crash tells us

The 2020-2022 graduation rates should be read with a footnote. Flexible attendance policies, expanded credit recovery options, and relaxed grading standards during the pandemic years pushed rates to levels that were not sustainable. When those policies normalized in 2023, the rates corrected.

This does not mean the improvement was entirely artificial. Alabama's 2025 rate of 91.56 percent exceeds every pre-COVID year, suggesting genuine underlying progress. But the 2020 peak of 91.71 percent was likely inflated by 1-2 percentage points of policy-driven gains that vanished the moment the policies did.

The 2023 crash was not a failure. It was a recalibration, and the fact that the state surpassed its pre-crash trajectory by 2025 suggests the underlying improvement trend is real.

By the numbers: 91.56%, Alabama's 2025 graduation rate, second-highest on record, after a 2.47pp dip in 2023 (the largest decline in a decade). Hardest hit: English learners (-7.5pp), students in foster care (-5.4pp).

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

In Barbour County, a Consolidation and a New Chapter for Jason Munford

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Pamela Allen-Ingram as the new principal of Barbour County Elementary School. Ms. Allen-Ingram is the outgoing principal of the former Barbour County Primary School and is retiring as of June 30, 2026. Jason Munford is the principal of the consolidated Barbour County Elementary School. The text has been corrected.

Jason Munford is the principal of Barbour County^↗ Elementary School, the newly consolidated campus that will bring Pre-K through sixth grade students together under one roof this summer in Louisville, Alabama. Munford, who previously led Barbour County Intermediate School serving second through sixth graders, now oversees a campus that merges two formerly separate schools as the district responds to years of enrollment decline.

The consolidation is a response to math that has become unavoidable. Barbour County enrolled 938 students in 2014-15. This year, that number is 537, a 43% decline in 11 years, an average loss of about 36 students per year. The primary school was operating with roughly 100 students.

Munford was introduced by the district in August 2023 as the new principal of Barbour County Intermediate School. Ms. Allen-Ingram said Munford and his staff "have made a significant impact in Barbour County Schools and deserve their recognition and many accolades."

The foundation Allen-Ingram built

Pamela Allen-Ingram, who is retiring as of June 30, 2026, served as principal of Barbour County Primary School, which covered Pre-K through first grade. She is currently principal of the Barbour County Pre-K and Alternative Education Program. Her years leading the youngest learners in the district shaped her conviction that early childhood education determines everything that follows.

"The Pre-K through first grade years are the most critical foundation for a child's academic success and confidence as a learner," Allen-Ingram said. "These early experiences shape how students view school, relationships, and themselves."

Her priorities centered on three areas: early literacy, social-emotional development, and family engagement. "When schools and families work together, students are more confident and better prepared to succeed," she said.

The emphasis on literacy aligns with gains the district has made under the Alabama Literacy Act. Superintendent Dr. Keith Stewart told WTVM that reading proficiency at the primary level rose from roughly 28% to 81%, a jump he cited as evidence that the district's academic trajectory is moving in the right direction even as enrollment falls.

Preparing for consolidation

The merger of the primary and intermediate campuses, announced in May 2025, will bring Pre-K through sixth grade students together at the intermediate school campus in Louisville, about 15 minutes from the former primary school site. The district expects the move to free resources for a full-time assistant principal and counselor, positions the smaller campuses could not justify individually.

Allen-Ingram said clear communication was central to the transition during her time leading the primary school. "Change can create uncertainty, so it was important that everyone felt informed, supported, and included throughout the process," she said. For staff, that meant aligning expectations and instructional practices across grade levels that previously operated in separate buildings. "Bringing teams together helped build a shared vision and ensured continuity for students as they moved through the grades on one campus."

A district under pressure

Barbour County sits in Alabama's Black Belt, with a school-age child poverty rate above 40% and a population that has been declining for decades. The school system is one of seven county school systems in the state with fewer than 1,000 students. This year, Barbour County Elementary School enrolled 266 students and Barbour County High School enrolled 271.

The enrollment decline has been unrelenting. Only two years in the past 11, 2020-21 and 2021-22, saw modest gains, likely a brief COVID-era bounce. Since then, the district has lost 181 students in four years. The 2025-26 loss of 60 students was the third-largest annual drop in the period.

Chronic absenteeism compounds the enrollment challenge. In 2024-25, 48.5% of Barbour County students were chronically absent, the highest rate in Alabama, meaning nearly one in two students missed 18 or more days of school.

Sustaining the gains

Asked whether the district's reading proficiency improvements can hold as enrollment continues to shrink, Allen-Ingram pointed to systems rather than scale.

"Sustainability depends on maintaining those systems rather than relying on temporary initiatives," she said. "Smaller enrollment can actually provide opportunities to strengthen individualized instruction, deepen teacher collaboration, and ensure interventions are more responsive to student needs."

She added that continued professional development for teachers and protected instructional time will be essential. "I also believe supporting teachers with resources, collaboration, and professional learning is essential to making that vision a reality."

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.

Nine Records at Once: Alabama's Class of 2025 Set Highs Across Race, Poverty, and Disability

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Alabama Graduation Rates: Nine Records · 2023 Crash · Birmingham · Foster Care · CCR Gap

Correction (July 23, 2026): An earlier version of this article gave Black students' 2020 graduation peak as 89.1 percent and said the state's 91.6 percent rate left roughly 5,000 students without a diploma. The 2020 Black rate was 89.7 percent, and the number without a diploma was roughly 4,400.

Alabama's Class of 2025 did not produce a single record-breaking headline. It produced nine.

White students, Pacific Islander students, Hispanic students, male students, economically disadvantaged students, special education students, English learners, students who are currently homeless, and military-connected students all graduated at the highest rates ever recorded in the state. The overall rate of 91.6 percent is the second-highest on record, trailing only the 91.7 percent posted in 2020, a figure widely considered inflated by COVID-era grading and attendance policies.

The breadth of the 2025 results is what matters. This is not one demographic lifting the average. It is simultaneous progress across groups that share almost nothing in common except that schools have historically struggled to serve them.

Where each record stands

The headline numbers: economically disadvantaged students reached 87.9 percent, up from 82.0 percent a decade ago. Special education students hit 78.4 percent, a nearly 12-point improvement since 2015. English learners climbed to 83.3 percent after a brutal 2023 when they fell to 67.9 percent. Students who are currently homeless posted 86.3 percent, erasing a 12-point deficit accumulated during the pandemic years.

Male students crossed 90 percent for the first time, reaching 90.0 percent and narrowing the gender gap to 3.1 percentage points, the smallest in the dataset. Military-connected students led everyone at 94.4 percent.

The groups that did not set records in 2025 are telling, too. Black students reached 88.8 percent, a strong showing but below their 2020 peak of 89.7 percent. Asian students had no reportable 2025 rate due to small sample sizes. And students in foster care, at 62.4 percent, are on the opposite trajectory entirely, declining every year since tracking began.

A decade of convergence

The most important pattern is not any single record but the narrowing distances between groups. In 2015, the gap between the overall rate and the special education rate was 20.1 percentage points. In 2025, it is 13.2. The gap for economically disadvantaged students shrank from 4.8 to 3.6 points. For English learners, from 19.4 to 8.3 points.

This convergence is happening because the groups that started lowest have improved the fastest. English learners gained 16.1 points over the decade. Special education students gained 11.8. Economically disadvantaged students gained 6.0. The overall rate gained 4.8, meaning every one of these groups outpaced the average.

The 2023 crash and the rebound

The path was not smooth. In 2023, Alabama's graduation rate dropped 2.5 percentage points in a single year, the sharpest decline in the dataset. Every subgroup fell except special education, which ticked up half a point. English learners took the hardest hit, falling 7.5 points. Students in foster care dropped 5.4 points. The crash was widely attributed to the expiration of COVID-era supports: flexible attendance policies, credit recovery programs, and relaxed graduation requirements.

The rebound over the next two years was equally dramatic. The state gained back 3.4 percentage points across 2024 and 2025, with English learners recovering 15.4 points, the fastest two-year improvement of any group.

What it does not mean

Nine records should not be confused with the absence of problems. The white-Black graduation gap sits at 4.2 percentage points in 2025, essentially unchanged from 4.1 points in 2015. Both groups improved in lockstep, never closing the distance. The foster care rate is in freefall. And the state's overall rate, at 91.6 percent, still means roughly 4,400 students did not receive a diploma with their cohort.

But in a year when education data nationally skews toward decline and crisis, Alabama produced something unusual: broad-based, simultaneous improvement across the groups most at risk of being left behind.

By the numbers: 9 of 16 subgroups at all-time highs in 2025. The largest gains over the decade: English learners +16.1pp, special education +11.8pp, economically disadvantaged +6.0pp.

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

Mobile County Has Lost One in Five Students

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Alabama 2025-26 Enrollment.

Mobile County^↗ enrolled 46,700 students in 2025-26. That is 11,829 fewer than the 58,529 it enrolled in 2015-16, a loss of 20.2% in a decade. No other district in Alabama has shed more students in raw numbers over the same period. And no year in the 10-year streak, not even the mildest one, produced a gain.

The district remains the state's largest, but the gap is narrowing. Mobile's share of Alabama's total public school enrollment has slipped from 7.8% to 6.5% since 2015. At the average rate of loss over the past decade, 1,183 students per year, the district will fall below 45,000 within two years.

Ten years without a single gain

The decline has been remarkably consistent. Even the "best" year in the streak, 2019-20, saw a loss of 215 students. The worst was 2023-24, when Mobile shed 2,203 students, a 4.4% single-year drop that erased more students than some Alabama districts enroll in total.

Before the streak began, Mobile was growing. The district added 1,293 students in 2015-16, pushing enrollment to its data-era peak. Then the reversal began immediately: a loss of 1,493 in 2016-17, followed by 1,699 in 2017-18. The early losses alone exceeded 3,000 students in two years.

The pace has not followed a straight line. Losses moderated around the pandemic, when Mobile lost a relatively mild 215 students in 2019-20 and 880 in 2020-21. But after 2021, the decline reaccelerated. The three-year stretch from 2022 through 2024 erased 4,701 students, nearly 40% of the entire decade's losses compressed into three years.

Not just Mobile, but Mobile most of all

Mobile is not alone among Alabama's large districts in losing students. Birmingham has lost 24.5% of its enrollment since 2016. Montgomery County has lost 19.9%. Jefferson County, the state's second-largest, is down 9.2%.

But Mobile's losses are the largest in absolute terms. The 11,829 students it has lost since 2016 nearly match Birmingham's losses (6,248) and Montgomery's (6,171) combined. Only two of the state's 10 largest districts have grown over the same period: Madison City, up 26.3%, and Madison County, up 1.6%. Both are in the Huntsville metro area, a region buoyed by aerospace and defense employment that has attracted families while the rest of the state shrinks.

Fewer white students, fewer Black students

Demographic data, available through 2024-25, shows that Mobile's losses are not concentrated in one racial group. Both white and Black enrollment have fallen substantially. White enrollment dropped from 25,338 to 17,525 between 2016 and 2025, a loss of 7,813 students (30.8%). Black enrollment fell from 29,484 to 24,070, a loss of 5,414 (18.4%).

The two groups are shrinking at different rates, which has shifted the district's composition. White students made up 41.9% of Mobile's race-reported enrollment in 2016; by 2025, that share had dropped to 34.6%. Black students held relatively steady as a share, slipping from 48.7% to 47.5%.

Hispanic enrollment is the one growth area. Mobile enrolled 3,262 Hispanic students in 2025, up from 1,995 in 2016, a gain of 63.5%. But the absolute numbers are small relative to the losses in other groups. Hispanic students have gone from 3.3% to 6.4% of enrollment, but their 1,267-student increase replaces only a fraction of the 13,227 students lost across white and Black enrollment.

Multiracial enrollment has also grown, from 1,265 to 3,558, though some of that growth reflects reclassification rather than new arrivals, as families select multiple racial categories on updated federal reporting forms.

Where the students went

Several forces are pulling students out of Mobile County Public Schools simultaneously, making it difficult to attribute the decline to a single cause.

The most direct is population stagnation. Mobile County's population has barely moved in 16 years, growing just 0.05% from 413,328 in 2010 to an estimated 413,527. A flat population with a declining school-age share, driven by lower birth rates nationally, means fewer children entering the pipeline each year.

Alabama's CHOOSE Act, which took effect for the 2025-26 school year, added a new exit ramp. The education savings account program provides $7,000 per student for private school tuition or other educational expenses. Statewide, roughly 3,032 public school students received CHOOSE Act scholarships after leaving public schools in 2025-26, out of 23,429 total recipients. Three-quarters of recipients had already been enrolled in private schools. The program's county-by-county impact on public enrollment is not yet broken out in public data, but Mobile County, as the state's largest district, is likely absorbing a disproportionate share of the departures.

A third factor is harder to measure. State Superintendent Eric Mackey told Alabama Daily News that roughly 2,100 students statewide had disappeared from enrollment records entirely, with no documentation of transferring to a private school or homeschooling. "They are not on the radar anywhere," Mackey said. "They did not show up for school public or private." Superintendents initially reported that most of these missing students were Hispanic, though Mackey later clarified that the state actually gained 300 Hispanic students year over year.

A shrinking slice of a shrinking pie

Mobile's decline is outpacing the state's. Alabama as a whole has lost 4.7% of its enrollment since 2016, falling from 749,897 to 714,363. Mobile has lost 20.2% over the same period, more than four times the state rate. The result is a steady erosion of Mobile's share of state enrollment, from 7.8% to 6.5%.

That shrinking share carries fiscal weight. Alabama distributes state education funding through the Foundation Program, which allocates resources based on student counts. Fewer students means fewer state dollars, even as fixed costs for building maintenance, transportation routes, and administrative staff do not shrink at the same rate. Mobile's 2024-25 budget fell to $804 million, a 17.5% drop from the prior year's $975 million, driven largely by the expiration of federal COVID relief funding that had masked the enrollment decline's fiscal impact for several years.

What comes next

The CHOOSE Act's first-year effect is now baked into the 2025-26 numbers, and the 666-student loss Mobile recorded in 2025-26 is the second-mildest in the streak, behind only the 215-student dip in 2019-20. Whether that moderation holds or represents a one-year pause before deeper losses resume will depend on how many additional families use the ESA program in year two, whether Alabama's projected 500 teacher position reductions statewide fall disproportionately on large declining districts, and whether Mobile's flat population continues to translate into fewer school-age children.

The district's kindergarten pipeline offers a clue. If incoming cohorts remain smaller than graduating ones, the structural math guarantees further decline regardless of policy changes. Mobile enrolled 57,236 students when this dataset begins in 2014-15. It now enrolls 46,700. The question is no longer whether the decline will continue, but how far it goes before the district stabilizes at a fundamentally different size.

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 through 2025-26, 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. When income limits lift in 2027-28, 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 in 2026-27.

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.

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Phillip Brooks Takes the Helm at a School That Rewrote Its Own Name

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Phillip Brooks is the new principal of Johnson Abernathy Graetz High School in Montgomery, the second-largest school in Montgomery Public Schools^↗ and one that carries a name chosen to honor the civil rights movement that shaped the city.

"It is an honor to serve as principal of Johnson Abernathy Graetz High School and to lead a community with such a rich history and purpose," Brooks said in a statement released by the district. "My focus is on building strong relationships, creating a safe and supportive environment, and ensuring every student has access to the opportunities and resources they need to succeed."

Brooks succeeds Carlos Hammonds, who was appointed principal in July 2023 shortly after the school's renaming. MPS describes Brooks as a veteran educator with a background in school leadership, student support, and community engagement.

A school with a new identity

JAG High School operated as Jefferson Davis High School for more than 50 years before the Montgomery Public Schools board voted 5-2 in November 2022 to rename it. The school now honors three figures from Montgomery's civil rights history: Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr., the federal judge whose rulings helped dismantle segregation; Ralph Abernathy, the pastor and close associate of Martin Luther King Jr.; and Rev. Robert Graetz, the white Lutheran minister who supported the Montgomery Bus Boycott and whose home was bombed for it. The school unveiled its new mascot, the Jaguars, in July 2023.

The renaming placed a marker: this is a school that decided to reckon with its own history. Brooks will lead a campus of roughly 1,466 students where the work of defining what comes after that reckoning is still underway.

The district Brooks joins

Superintendent Dr. Zickeyous Byrd, who arrived in May 2025 from Selma City Schools, expressed confidence in the appointment.

"Johnson Abernathy Graetz High School carries a powerful legacy, and it is critical that we continue moving that legacy forward with strong, student-centered leadership," Byrd said. "Mr. Brooks is a relationship-driven leader who understands the importance of accountability, academic growth, and community connection. I am confident in his ability to lead JAG into its next chapter and deliver meaningful results for our students and families."

Montgomery Public Schools is navigating enrollment shifts that give that confidence particular weight. The district has posted 10 consecutive years of decline, falling from a peak of 31,082 students in 2016 to 24,911 in 2026, a loss of nearly 6,200 students.

JAG's own trajectory mirrors the district pattern. Enrollment fell from 1,933 in 2015 to a low of 1,427 in 2025 before ticking up slightly to 1,466 in 2025-26. That small rebound, during a year when the district as a whole lost another 580 students, is a data point worth watching.

The demographic composition of JAG's student body reflects the broader district. Montgomery Public Schools is roughly 76% Black, 14% Hispanic, and 8% white as of 2025. The district's English learner population has more than doubled since 2016, reaching 3,155 students, or about 12% of enrollment, a shift that touches staffing, curriculum, and the daily work of building a school culture.

What Brooks named first

In his statement, Brooks listed his priorities in a specific order: relationships, then safety, then access to resources. He closed with attendance and academic outcomes.

"Together, we will work to strengthen attendance, improve academic outcomes, and empower every student to reach their full potential," he said.

The attendance reference is not incidental. JAG earned a D grade from the Alabama State Department of Education in 2023-24, up from an F the prior year, a trajectory that suggests momentum even if the starting point is low. Brooks inherits a school that has shown it can move in the right direction.

Montgomery Public Schools is in a period of reinvention under Byrd's "Vision 2026" strategic plan, which includes converting two elementary schools into full magnet programs and establishing a workforce development center. Brooks will lead one of the district's largest campuses through that transition, in a school that already proved it is willing to change what it calls itself. The harder question, the one every new principal faces, is whether the work inside the building can match the ambition of the name on the outside.

Phillip Brooks did not respond to a separate request for comment. Rosanna Smith Brewton, MPS Director of Communications, provided the district's official statement on his behalf.

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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.

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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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Alabama Publishes 2025-26 Enrollment Data

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Alabama 2025-26 Enrollment.

A year ago, Alabama's enrollment story had a silver lining. The state had lost students, yes, but the pace seemed to be slowing. The 2024-25 count of 717,473 was down from the prior year, though not by as much as the COVID-era drops. Some districts posted small gains. Huntsville held steady. State Superintendent Eric Mackey acknowledged the headwinds (birth rates, school choice, immigration) but the prevailing mood was that Alabama had found something close to a floor.

Then the Alabama State Department of Education posted its 2025-26 enrollment figures, and the floor gave way: 714,363 public school students, down 3,110 from the prior year. That extends a four-year decline streak to 21,445 lost students since the 2021-22 peak of 735,808. At the current pace, the state will fall below 700,000 before the decade ends. Whatever floor people thought they saw last year was not a floor.

What the numbers open up

The enrollment data covers 155 districts, from Huntsville's defense-driven suburbs to Black Belt counties where half the students have disappeared in a decade. Over the coming weeks, The ALEdTribune will unpack it in a series of data-driven articles. Here is what jumps out first.

Alabama just hit its lowest enrollment in 12 years of data. The 714,363 figure is not just lower than last year. It is the lowest point since at least 2014-15, when the state enrolled 732,698. The four-year decline of 21,445 students has erased a decade of modest growth, and the trajectory shows no sign of reversal.

White students dropped below 50% for the first time. In 2024-25, the white share of Alabama's public school enrollment fell to 49.97%, crossing below the majority line. Alabama is now a majority-minority state for public school enrollment, a demographic milestone a generation in the making.

Only one in five districts recovered from COVID. Of 135 districts with consistent data, just 29 have returned to their pre-pandemic enrollment levels. The other 106 are still below where they were in 2019-20, and most are falling further behind each year.

By the numbers: 714,363 students statewide in 2025-26, down 21,445 from the 2021-22 peak, a 2.9% decline across four years and the lowest enrollment in over a decade of state data.

The threads we are following

The Black Belt is emptying out. Perry County has lost 57.7% of its students since 2014-15. Sumter County has lost 52.4%. Nine districts have declined every single year for 11 consecutive years (the full span of available data) and six of them are Black Belt counties where out-migration has hollowed communities to the bone.

English learners quadrupled in a decade. LEP enrollment surged from 1.9% to 7.1% of students between 2015 and 2025, driven largely by Hispanic immigration into north Alabama's poultry processing corridor. One in every 14 Alabama students is now classified as an English learner. Whether that growth has peaked, given federal immigration enforcement, is one of the open questions.

Mobile County has lost one in five students. The state's largest coastal district shed 12,726 students over the past decade, a 20.2% decline that outpaces the state average by a wide margin. Meanwhile, Huntsville City stands as essentially the only large district not in freefall.

What comes next

This is the first in a series of articles examining what the 2025-26 enrollment data reveals about Alabama public schools. New articles publish weekly on Tuesdays.

The enrollment figures come from the ALSDE Reports & Data. The data covers headcount enrollment for public school districts statewide.

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