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There is an interesting trend that has persisted for at least six years. Mississippi public school enrollment continues to decline.
Only one of the last six years has shown a significant decline in enrollment. Unsurprisingly, it was 2020-21, his first year since the covid-19 pandemic closed his school a few months earlier. It still goes down every year.
The state’s public school enrollment for 2020-2021 was 442,000, according to the Mississippi Today website. This was a whopping 5% drop from the previous year, when he had 466,000 enrollments in 2019-20.
Before that, the number of registrants was declining.
• 483,000 in 2016-17.
• 5,000 down from 478,000 in 2017-18.
• 7,000 decrease from 471,000 in 2018-19. Then, in 2019-20, it dropped another 5,000.
Enrollments have continued to decline since the peak of the pandemic in 2020-2021, but at a much lower rate. Mississippi public schools will lose fewer than 1,000 students in 2021-2022. In the current academic year when enrollment was 440,000 he had fewer than 2,000.
In total, Mississippi has lost 43,000 public school students over the past six years. But more than half of that decline occurred in the 2020-21 pandemic year, when many schools switched from traditional classroom instruction to online learning, or a combination of classroom work and Internet instruction.
The big problem, of course, is: Where have all the kids gone? Especially since 2020-21. You would have thought that enrollment would have increased the following year as students who had not formally participated in COVID-19 education returned. But it didn’t. where are they?
Mississippi Today doesn’t provide an answer to that puzzle, but a few possibilities come to mind:
• The number of births in the US is declining each year. From 2008 to 2009 he saw a drop in births due to the Great Recession, but the pandemic seems to have had a similar effect. It wouldn’t be surprising if some of Mississippi’s decline in public school enrollment reflected this trend.
• More families may be choosing other options, such as private school or home schooling. Families that have tried either between 2020 and 2021 may have decided to continue with it afterwards. It may explain why not.
• Other less likely factors, such as moving from Mississippi or dropping out of high school. Mississippi made the news as he was one of her three states to see a decline in population in 2020. But the drop was only a few thousand, too small to have a significant impact on school enrollment. When it comes to dropouts, states have more than the percentage of children who fail to finish school. The question is whether this number has increased significantly in the last six years.
The best bet is a combination of lower fertility and transfer to other schools. In six years he will drop 43,000 students is an obvious concern.
— Jack Ryan, McComb Enterprise-Journal
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