Thousands of students in Missouri and Kansas have left public school in the last four years, in line with a national trend of more families disengaging from public education. An analysis by the Associated Press, Big Local News and Stanford University economist Thomas Dee found enrollment in Missouri’s public schools dropped by 2% from the 2019-2020 school year to the 2022-2023 school year — making up nearly 18,000 students. Public school enrollment in Kansas is down about 16,000 students from its peak in 2015. Statewide enrollment numbers just released for 2023-2024 show 505,515 students in school this year, a 3% drop from the 2014-2015 school year. Nationally, the AP’s study found private schooling grew nearly 8% and homeschooling grew by nearly 27% during the same time period among more than 30 states with credible private, public or homeschool enrollment data. Collin Hitt, executive director of the PRiME Center, which studies education in Missouri, said it’s been an open question if that state’s homeschooling jump was temporary. “Given the fact that we’re seeing public K through 12 enrollments stay relatively flat, it probably suggests this is something that’s going to continue for some time, which is a major development,” Hitt said. Thousands of students across the country still haven’t returned to the classroom since the pandemic shut schools down for months. An estimated 230,0000 students were considered “missing” in fall 2021, meaning demographic changes or increases in private school or homeschooling couldn’t account for their disappearance from public education. Students have since slowly made their way back to varying forms of education or aged out of school, leaving only 50,000 kids unaccounted for. Missouri doesn’t track private school data and doesn’t legally require parents to notify when they homeschool their child. However, most parents will notify their public school district if they switch to homeschooling. Based on that limited data, Missouri has seen a 34% increase in homeschooling since 2019 — but that doesn’t include children who never attended public schools to begin with. Education leaders anticipated a drop in enrollment across the country because of declining birth rates. U.S. birth rates have been on the downswing for more than a decade, hitting a record low in 2020. The AP found there are 3,000 fewer school-aged children in Missouri compared to when the pandemic began.
Source: The Lawrence Times
