Texas sees significant drop in public school enrollment

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]The state of Texas saw a drop of more than 75,000 students signing up for traditional public schools.

[00:00:06]>> And Fox 4's Shannon Murray is in our newsroom this evening with some context about what this means for Texas public schools. Shannon. Yeah, let's start with this. It's the first time since 1987 outside of the pandemic that our state has had a decline in the number of students going to your traditional public school districts. This is what the state committee on education heard Monday. Since 1987, this is only the second drop in traditional ISD enrollment. Now, at the pandemic, there were 122,000 student decline. That number bounced back last year. More than half, more than 5 and 1/2 million students enroll. This school year, more than 75,000 of those have disappeared.

[00:00:46]Mary Lynn Preneta is director of texas26, I'm sorry, texas36.org.

[00:00:51]She says this is a relatively small percentage of students in your ISDs.

[00:00:57]I think the most important number for children and for the moms and dads of Texas is actually whether or not students can read and do math on grade level. And that number for a long time has been incredibly concerning. In the state of Texas today, we have only half of our students that are reading and doing math on grade level in Texas public schools.

[00:01:17]But Bob Templeton with Strive Public Policy Resources sees the enrollment decline in ISDs as a cautionary tale, not a one-off, both for the immediate and long-term future of public school ISDs.

[00:01:30]This will lead to four sustained problems for school districts in the next year. That will be revenue erosion which outpaced cost relief, a concentration of high-need students, and teacher market stress.

[00:01:45]Next year's enrollment across our Texas public schools will likely be more than 120,000 students less.

[00:01:53]And over the next four to five years, we could be at around 5 million students.

[00:01:57]While losing as many as 500,000 over the next three or four years, those leaving the district are majority Hispanic and bilingual students with 60% of the decline at the elementary K through K through five grade level. Overall, Texas is seeing a three to four percent decline in school age enrollment in traditional ISDs. That means that ISDs should continue to see less state money and be forced to make more hard choices while alternative education like home school, online school, charter schools continue to grow and we wait to see how many students exit public districts for private schools with the state's new voucher program. There are other factors around also like birth rates declining across Texas and you know what really nationwide. Plus, Texas has benefited from immigration, people moving here from other states, what they call domestic immigration, as well as coming here from other countries. That brought balance to declining birth rates, but now both of those slowing down as well.