The Louisiana public school system is experiencing a 5% drop in enrollment across the last four years. That’s according to a new report released this week [August 19] from the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana (PAR). The decline continues a trend seen in recent years of fewer students attending K-12 public schools. PAR President Steve Procopio, Ph.D., says the numbers are concerning. “People are going back to school. Why don’t we look at the stats a little bit. We weren’t setting out to try to prove anything. But now, when you look at the data, and you can see the year over year trend, there’s some very disturbing numbers in there.”
The student population has now declined to the lowest level in 16 years. According to the latest figures provided by the Department of Education, Louisiana had 680,023 students enrolled in K-12 public schools in February 2024. That’s lower than the enrollment in February 2008 when the student population stood at 681,017. And according to the report compiled by PAR, the numbers include students in public charter schools
Since 2008 enrollment had increased every year until 2017. Since then, Louisiana public schools have lost 41,174 [As the report mentions, that’s nearly the population of Alexandria]. Procopio says several factors contributed to this downward trend. The student loss factors include an increase in alternatives like charter schools, private schools, homeschooling, population loss, and COVID-19.
According to figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of school-aged children in Louisiana declined by 140,000 people, or 13% since 2000. As Dr. Procopio points out, homeschooling numbers also surged during the pandemic with a 74% jump overall in the last 10 years, representing 6% of school-aged students.
The PAR report also broke down Louisiana public school enrollment by racial demographics, with Black and White students representing similar percentages of the population, while the number of Hispanic students has increased 59% over the last seven years.
More information about public school enrollment is available on the Louisiana Department of Education’s data center website at https://www.louisianabelieves.com/resources/library/studentattributes.
