Public school enrollment is declining. Three reasons why

Louisiana public school enrollment has fallen to just under 665,000 students—the lowest in two decades and the ninth consecutive year of decline, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The number will keep falling.

Why it matters: State school funding is largely tied to enrollment headcount—fewer students means less revenue, but fixed costs like buildings and administration don't shrink proportionally. Smaller public school systems in rural areas are more affected than large ones.

The biggest cause: fewer births. Louisiana recorded roughly 65,500 live births in 2007. By 2024, that number had dropped to 53,305. Children born in those smaller groups enter kindergarten five or six years later and spend thirteen years moving through the system. The pipeline has been delivering smaller classes at every grade level every year for more than a decade. It will continue doing so, as birth rates are likely to continue dropping. 

The second cause: people leaving. Louisiana has been losing residents for years, most recently 84,000 between 2020 and 2023, making it one of the fastest-shrinking states in the country. Families with school-age children are departing with everyone else. A state that is losing people is losing students.

The third cause: where the remaining students are going to school. This one is more complicated—and more consequential for public school budgets.

Charter school enrollment grew from roughly 74,000 students in 2015-16 to nearly 95,000 by 2022-23. Because Louisiana classifies charter schools as public schools, that growth is invisible in the headline enrollment number. It is not invisible to traditional public schools, which lost those students and the per-pupil funding that follows them.

Homeschooling grew by 74% over the same period, from about 9,800 students to more than 17,000, with most of the jump arriving during the pandemic and not reverting.

What's coming: Lower birth rates from 2015 to 2020 have not fully translated to the K-12 pipeline. When they do, enrollment will fall further.

The bottom line: Louisiana's traditional public schools are caught between a shrinking population, a declining birth rate and a policy environment that routes more students—and their funding—elsewhere. Two of those forces are beyond any school board's control. The third, charter and other schools, is not.