In this series: Louisiana 2025-26 Enrollment.

No parish in Louisiana has lost more students since 2019 than Caddo Parish^↗. Its 5,611-student decline, a 14.8% drop from 37,868 to 32,257, outpaces Jefferson Parish's^↗ loss of 5,160 and East Baton Rouge's^↗ loss of 3,629. Caddo has not posted a single year of growth in the data. Not one.

The decline decelerated sharply in 2024-25, when Caddo lost just 110 students, a 0.3% dip that looked like a floor. Then 2025-26 brought a loss of 247, more than double the prior year. The floor was a ledge.

The shape of the loss

Caddo's enrollment trajectory has two phases. From 2019 to 2021, the parish shed students at roughly 1,400 per year, a pace that exceeded the statewide traditional-parish decline rate by more than double. In 2020-21, Caddo's 3.9% annual loss was nearly three times the state traditional average of 1.4%.

The second phase, from 2022 forward, saw the annual losses shrink: 1,123, then 691, then 629, then 110. That deceleration reflected less a recovery than a smaller base. A parish losing 110 students out of 32,504 is not stabilizing. It is running out of students to lose in the categories driving the decline.

The 2025-26 uptick to a 247-student loss, while small in absolute terms, reversed the deceleration trend and signals that the remaining enrollment base is not yet stable.

A two-front demographic shift

The losses cut across racial lines but not evenly. White enrollment fell by 3,255 students, a 30.0% decline that dropped its share from 28.7% to 23.6%. Black enrollment fell by 2,892, a 12.1% decline, but because Black students make up the majority of the district, that loss accounts for more than half of the total decline in absolute terms.

Hispanic enrollment grew by 412 students (25.9%), and multiracial enrollment rose by 136 (14.1%), but those gains replaced barely 10% of what the parish lost. Caddo's demographic composition is shifting: Black students now represent 65.2% of enrollment, up from 63.2% in 2019, while white students have fallen below one in four.

Where Shreveport's families are going

The enrollment decline tracks Shreveport's broader population loss. Caddo Parish lost more than 11,000 residents between 2020 and 2024, part of a statewide outmigration that has cost Louisiana more than 84,000 people since the 2020 census.

School board members have identified the destinations. Families are moving to Texas, DeSoto Parish, Bossier, and other places, drawn by economic opportunity and, in the case of neighboring parishes, perceived school quality. Bossier Parish^↗, which shares a metropolitan area with Caddo across the Red River, has held relatively steady, losing 4.6% over the same period compared to Caddo's 14.8%.

"We're bleeding out about 1,000 children every year. They're going to Texas, DeSoto Parish, Bossier and other places." -- 710 KEEL, reporting on Caddo school board discussion

The gap between the two parishes underscores that this is not purely a regional demographic shift. Caddo's losses reflect something specific to the district, likely a combination of Shreveport's economic stagnation, school performance perceptions, and the availability of alternatives. Bossier City's population grew by nearly 500 residents over the same period that Shreveport lost 11,000.

Three closures and counting

The fiscal math is straightforward. Louisiana's Minimum Foundation Program provides roughly $4,015 in base per-pupil state funding. A loss of 5,611 students translates to approximately $22.5 million less in state base funding over the seven-year period, compounding annually as each year's cohort stays gone.

The district has begun consolidating. In April 2024, the Caddo Parish School Board voted to close three schools: Queensborough Elementary, Blanchard Elementary, and Eighty-First Street Early Childhood Education Center. The projected savings: $750,000 to $1 million per year.

"When I first got on the board, we had 42,000 children in Caddo. We're now down to 33,000. You can't continue to run a school system and have 150 kids." -- Jasmine Green, Caddo Parish School Board President

Board member Don Little put the per-building cost in sharper terms: educating a child in a half-empty school costs close to $15,000 per student, compared to $5,500 in a school running near capacity.

The North Louisiana pattern

Caddo is the largest piece of a regional enrollment crisis across North Louisiana. Ouachita Parish^↗ (Monroe) has lost 2,004 students since 2019, a 10.4% decline. Rapides Parish^↗ (Alexandria) has lost 2,028, an 8.8% decline. Together, the three parishes have shed 9,643 students, roughly 15% of the statewide traditional-parish loss of 65,354.

Caddo's decline has outpaced its neighbors at every point in the data. By 2026, Caddo retains just 85.2% of its 2019 enrollment, while Ouachita holds 89.6% and Rapides 91.2%. Bossier, the regional outlier, holds 95.4%.

The pattern is not unique to these three parishes. Fifteen Louisiana parishes have declined in every single year since 2019, including Morehouse, Jackson, and Concordia in the north. The seven-year unbroken decline streak is the longest possible in this dataset, and Caddo shares it with 14 other parishes.

The pipeline narrows

Caddo's kindergarten enrollment has fallen 15.6%, from 2,780 in 2019 to 2,345 in 2026. Grade 12 has fallen 12.9%, from 2,624 to 2,286. The kindergarten-to-twelfth-grade ratio has narrowed from 106 to 103, meaning fewer students are entering the system than are leaving it.

The 2025-26 kindergarten class of 2,345 is actually larger than the previous year's 2,229, a rare uptick that may reflect statistical noise in a small cohort rather than a genuine rebound.

Caddo has already closed Queensborough Elementary, Blanchard Elementary, and 81st Street Early Childhood Education Center. It passed millage renewals in March 2025 to shore up revenue. At the current pace, the parish will fall below 30,000 students before the end of the decade, and CFO Jeff Howard has told the board to budget for a loss of 750 students per year at $5,500 each. The savings from closing three schools cover less than a quarter of one year's enrollment-driven revenue loss.

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