Ascension Parish - EdTribune LA - Louisiana Education Data

Louisiana Lost 15,424 Students in One Year

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Louisiana 2025-26 Enrollment.

For five years after COVID emptied classrooms across Louisiana, the losses came in waves that seemed to be slowing. Traditional parish enrollment fell by 19,459 in the pandemic year, then 8,688, then 5,036. By 2024-25, the year-over-year decline had eased to just 2,775 students, a 0.5% dip that looked like the beginning of stabilization.

It was not. The 2025-26 school year erased that hope. Louisiana's 75 traditional parish school systems shed 15,424 students in a single year, a 2.6% loss that ranks as the largest non-COVID decline in the eight years of available data. Only the pandemic year itself was worse.

The false plateau

The trajectory since 2019 is unbroken decline: 643,986 students that year, 578,632 in 2025-26, a cumulative loss of 65,354 students, or 10.1%. But the pace of that decline varied in ways that made 2024-25 look like a turning point. After COVID's initial shock, year-over-year losses settled into a range of 5,000 to 8,000 students annually. Then came the 2024-25 reprieve, with just 2,775 lost. Parish superintendents had reason to believe the hemorrhaging was easing.

The 2025-26 data contradicts that reading. The 15,424-student loss is nearly six times larger than the prior year's and more than double the post-COVID annual average. Rather than a gradual deceleration, the seven-year pattern now resembles a saw-tooth: large loss, partial recovery of pace, then an even sharper non-COVID loss.

Nobody was spared

Sixty-seven of 75 traditional parishes, 89.3%, lost students in 2025-26. That matches the COVID year for the highest share in the dataset. Only eight parishes gained enrollment, and only one of those, Calcasieu Parish^↗, gained more than 30 students.

Six parishes each lost more than 500 students:

Parish	2024-25	2025-26	Change	Pct.
Jefferson^↗	47,459	45,406	-2,053	-4.3%
East Baton Rouge^↗	39,711	38,008	-1,703	-4.3%
Rapides^↗	21,879	20,997	-882	-4.0%
St. Tammany^↗	36,245	35,375	-870	-2.4%
Lafayette^↗	29,706	28,839	-867	-2.9%
Ascension^↗	23,950	23,422	-528	-2.2%

Jefferson Parish alone accounted for 13.3% of the statewide loss. Combined, these six parishes lost 6,903 students, or 44.8% of the state total. The remaining 55.2% was distributed across 61 other declining parishes, most losing between 50 and 400 students each.

The breadth of the decline is as significant as the depth. This is not a story about one struggling urban system pulling down a state average. St. Tammany, a suburban Northshore parish, and Ascension, one of the state's fastest-growing parishes for much of the last decade, both posted significant losses. When a Baton Rouge suburb and a New Orleans commuter parish are shrinking at similar rates, the underlying force is structural, not localized.

Bogalusa^↗, a small system in Washington Parish, posted the most extreme percentage loss at 23.7%, dropping from 1,835 to 1,400 students. For a system that small, a loss of 435 students threatens the viability of individual campuses.

Where the pipeline is narrowing

The kindergarten-to-senior comparison offers a preview of what is still coming. In 2018-19, Louisiana's traditional parishes enrolled 48,556 kindergartners and 40,410 seniors, a K-to-12th ratio of 120 to 100. By 2025-26, kindergarten had fallen to 41,885, a 13.7% decline, while 12th grade held at 38,604, a 4.5% drop. The ratio has compressed to 109 to 100.

The convergence means that incoming cohorts are substantially smaller than graduating ones. Each year's kindergarten class will take 13 years to pass through the system, carrying its smaller size with it. If 2025-26 kindergarten numbers approximate the trend, the enrollment decline currently concentrated in elementary grades will reach middle schools by 2030 and high schools by 2034.

A state losing its people

The most likely driver of this decline is demographic: Louisiana is losing population. The state shed roughly 50,000 residents between 2020 and 2024, though 2024 brought a slight gain credited largely to international immigration. Domestic outmigration has not stopped: roughly 17,000 more people moved out of Louisiana than moved in during 2024, according to Census estimates.

The population loss maps closely onto the enrollment loss. Two-thirds of Louisiana parishes saw population declines in 2024. Caddo and Orleans parishes ranked among the top five fastest-shrinking large counties nationally.

Birth rate decline compounds the problem. As the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana noted in a 2024 report:

"With fewer women of child-bearing age living in Louisiana, there will naturally be fewer babies born in the state. The state has lost about 50,000 people in the last five years, and some of that is certainly among the child-bearing age population." -- Red River Radio, Aug 2024

A competing explanation is the growth of alternatives to traditional public schools. Homeschooling in Louisiana has surged 74% over the past decade, and charter enrollment has expanded, though charter entities are reported separately in this analysis. The two forces, demographic shrinkage and school-choice expansion, are not mutually exclusive. Both can be true simultaneously, and the data cannot distinguish how much of the 15,424-student loss reflects families leaving the state versus families choosing a different kind of school within it.

The funding math

The fiscal consequences are direct. Louisiana funds schools on a per-pupil basis, and the state Department of Education projects that declining enrollment will reduce state spending by approximately $42 million in the coming fiscal year. State Superintendent Cade Brumley has recommended lawmakers approve $47 more per student, nearly a 50% increase, for mandatory costs such as employee health insurance, retirement contributions, and fuel. The base per-pupil funding amount has not changed since 2019.

The structural mismatch is familiar to declining districts nationwide: fixed costs do not shrink with enrollment. Electricity, building maintenance, and transportation routes cost roughly the same whether a school serves 400 students or 350. In New Orleans, which has faced its own enrollment decline within the charter-managed system, nine schools had at least 20% of available seats empty as of early 2025, and nine schools have closed since the enrollment crisis began. The city's district data chief Max Daigh summed it up: "The district can't enroll kids who don't exist."

Fifty-five parishes at record lows

The 2025-26 school year pushed 55 of 75 traditional parishes, 73.3%, to their lowest enrollment in the eight years of available data. That figure understates the severity: for most of these parishes, each of the last several years has set a new record low. The decline is not episodic. It is compounding.

In New Orleans, nine schools have already closed. In Caddo Parish, three more shut down this year. In East Baton Rouge, nine schools were consolidated, displacing over 10,000 students. Each of these closures followed years of incremental losses that seemed manageable until they were not. The 2025-26 data brought that reckoning to 55 parishes at once.

The Minimum Foundation Program sends roughly $4,015 per student in base funding. The 15,424 students Louisiana lost this year represent roughly $62 million in annual state revenue that is not coming back. The buildings those students attended are still there, still requiring heat and maintenance and a principal. For 67 parishes that lost enrollment in a single year, the math is the same in every one: the costs stay and the funding leaves.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Louisiana's White Student Share Falls to 40%

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Louisiana 2025-26 Enrollment.

Seven years ago, nearly half the students in Louisiana's public schools were white. In 2025-26, that share fell to 40.2%, a 6.9 percentage point decline that reflects both a real demographic transformation and a statistical artifact of how the state counts its charter school students.

The raw numbers: white enrollment dropped by 54,294 students across Louisiana's 74 traditional parish districts since 2018-19, a 17.9% decline. That loss dwarfs every other racial group's change. Black enrollment fell by 26,763 students (10.6%) over the same period. Hispanic enrollment, by contrast, grew by 12,711 students (23.6%), and multiracial enrollment rose by 5,077 (26.5%). The net effect: a student body that was 47.1% white and 39.2% Black in 2019 is now 43.0% white and 39.0% Black in traditional parishes alone.

The statewide figure of 40.2% is lower still. That is because Louisiana began incorporating charter entities, including the predominantly Black Orleans Parish^↗ school system, into its enrollment data starting in 2022. The charter sector is only 20.3% white. Adding roughly 82,000 charter students to the denominator pushed the statewide white share down an additional 2.8 percentage points beyond the parish-level trend.

A decline with no exceptions

The white enrollment decline is not concentrated in one region. It is everywhere. Of Louisiana's 74 traditional parishes, 70 lost white students between 2019 and 2026. Only four parishes gained any, and the largest of those, West Feliciana^↗, added just 24 white students.

St. Tammany Parish^↗ lost the most in absolute terms: 5,408 white students, a 20.3% decline. This is the state's most affluent suburban parish, a longtime destination for families seeking strong public schools on the North Shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Livingston Parish^↗, another suburban stronghold east of Baton Rouge, lost 3,321 white students (15.9%), though it remains 66.5% white. Caddo Parish^↗ in northwest Louisiana lost 3,255 white students, a 30.0% decline that pushed its white share from 28.7% down to 23.6%.

The losses are not just a function of parish size. Lafayette Parish^↗ lost 3,004 white students (20.5%), Jefferson Parish^↗ lost 2,785 (22.9%), and Bossier Parish^↗ lost 1,998 (15.7%). Every one of Louisiana's 12 largest traditional parishes lost at least 1,400 white students over the seven-year span.

Six parishes crossed the line

Six parishes that had white-majority student bodies in 2019 no longer do. Ascension Parish^↗, the fast-growing suburban corridor south of Baton Rouge, went from 54.5% white to 48.4%. Bossier Parish fell from 55.7% to 49.2%. Webster Parish^↗ saw the steepest share drop of the six, falling from 54.5% to 45.2%, a 9.3 percentage point decline. Assumption Parish^↗, DeSoto Parish^↗, and St. Charles Parish^↗ also crossed below 50%.

The number of white-majority parishes statewide shrank from 34 in 2019 to 27 in 2026. Many of the remaining 27 are small, rural, and concentrated in the northwest and southwest corners of the state. Cameron Parish^↗, with just 1,141 students, is still 88.4% white. Calcasieu Parish^↗, at 28,654 students and 54.3% white, is a bellwether -- large enough to matter, white enough to still be majority, but trending toward the tipping point.

The pace is not slowing down

Year-over-year white losses have been remarkably consistent. Traditional parishes lost 11,377 white students in 2020, 8,002 in 2021, then between 7,100 and 8,600 every year from 2022 through 2024. After a brief lull in 2025 (a loss of 1,984), the decline surged back to 8,998 in 2026, the second-largest annual loss on record. Across the full seven-year window, traditional parishes averaged a loss of roughly 7,756 white students per year.

Who is replacing them

The composition shift is not a simple swap. White enrollment fell by 54,294 students. Hispanic enrollment grew by 12,711, and multiracial enrollment grew by 5,077. Together, those gains replaced fewer than a third of the white students lost. Black enrollment also declined, by 26,763 students, though Black students' share of enrollment held nearly steady because the total enrollment base shrank.

Hispanic students now represent 11.5% of Louisiana's traditional parish enrollment, up from 8.4% in 2019. The growth rate was steepest between 2021 and 2024, when Hispanic enrollment grew by roughly 3,500 students per year. But that growth flattened in 2025 and reversed slightly in 2026, when Hispanic enrollment in traditional parishes fell by about 2,000 students. Whether this reflects a true plateau or a one-year fluctuation will take another year of data to determine.

Multiracial enrollment has grown every year since 2019, rising from 19,178 to 24,255 students. Its share grew from 3.0% to 4.2%. Part of this growth likely reflects changing identification patterns rather than new arrivals: as interracial families become more common and more families opt for the multiracial category on enrollment forms, the count rises independently of migration or birth rates.

Smaller cohorts, broader exits

Two forces are driving the white enrollment decline simultaneously, and the enrollment data cannot fully separate them.

The first is demographic. Louisiana's white birth rate is lower than the replacement rate. According to March of Dimes data for 2021-2023, the fertility rate for white women in Louisiana was 58.2 per 1,000 women ages 15-44, compared with 62.6 for Black women and 87.1 for Hispanic women. Fewer white kindergartners are entering the pipeline each year than white 12th-graders are leaving.

The second is outmigration. Louisiana lost more than 75,000 residents since 2020. In 2024, more than 17,000 more people left for other states than arrived. The state's population rebounded that year only because approximately 23,000 international immigrants arrived. The Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana identified rising homeschooling (up 74% over the past decade), private school enrollment, and out-of-state moves as contributors to public school losses. The enrollment data alone cannot determine which of these factors disproportionately affects white families, but the near-universality of the decline across 70 parishes suggests the forces are structural rather than localized.

"When you look at the data, and you can see the year over year trend, there's some very disturbing numbers in there." -- PAR President Steve Procopio, Red River Radio, Aug. 2024

A third factor looms. Governor Landry signed the GATOR Scholarship program on June 19, 2024, creating Louisiana's first universal Education Savings Account. Students began applying in spring 2025 for funds starting in fall 2025. Louisiana is now the 11th state with universal school choice. The 2025-26 data captured here may not yet reflect the program's impact, but if initial demand is any guide, the next few years of enrollment data could show an additional acceleration of white families exiting public schools.

The data caveat that matters

One methodological note deserves emphasis. Louisiana's statewide demographic percentages are not directly comparable before and after 2022. Prior to 2022, charter entities (including all of New Orleans' schools, which became an all-charter system after Hurricane Katrina) were not reported as separate entities in the state enrollment file. In 2022, charter entities began appearing, adding roughly 75,000 students to the reported total. Those charter students are disproportionately Black: Orleans Parish alone, which is 73.9% Black, adds about 43,000 students to the denominator.

This means the jump from 46.1% white in 2021 to 42.2% in 2022 is partly a reporting change, not a demographic change. The traditional-parish-only series, which is consistent across all eight years, shows a smoother trajectory: 47.1% in 2019, 45.3% in 2022, 43.0% in 2026. The real decline is roughly 4.1 percentage points, not the 6.9 points the all-entity numbers suggest. Both numbers are accurate. They just measure different things.

What a 40.2% share means on the ground

In Cameron Parish, 88.4% of students are white. In East Carroll Parish, 1.0% are. The statewide average of 40.2% describes almost nobody's actual experience. What it captures instead is a composition that has been shifting in every corner of the state at once -- 70 of 74 parishes losing white students simultaneously -- and that has now been accelerated by the 2025-2026 Hispanic enrollment dip.

The GATOR Scholarship Program, which began accepting applications in 2025 for its first year of funding, will add another layer. The program's first phase prioritized lower-income families, but its expansion to universal eligibility by 2027-28 could draw disproportionately white and affluent families into private options, accelerating the demographic shift in public schools without changing the underlying population at all. Louisiana will still have the same children. They will just attend different kinds of schools, and the traditional public system's student body will look even less like the communities its buildings sit in.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

One in Nine Louisiana Students Is Now Hispanic

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Louisiana 2025-26 Enrollment.

In a state losing students almost everywhere, Hispanic enrollment grew by 21,935 between 2019 and 2026, a 40.8% increase. Louisiana now counts 75,713 Hispanic students in its public schools, up from 53,778 seven years ago. Their share of enrollment climbed from 8.4% to 11.5%, a 3.1 percentage-point shift that has occurred quietly, without a single year of statewide decline until 2025.

That growth happened while white enrollment dropped by 37,717 students, a 12.4% loss. It is the second-largest absolute gain of any racial group in the state, trailing only Black enrollment, which added 24,821 students over the same period. Together, Hispanic and multiracial students (up 41.7%) are rewriting the demographic profile of Louisiana's schools at a pace that outstrips how quickly the state can hire the teachers to serve them.

Seven years of growth, then a plateau

The trajectory is not a straight line. Hispanic enrollment grew modestly in 2020 (+473 students, less than 1%) before accelerating sharply from 2021 through 2024, when it gained between 3,500 and 4,200 students annually. The 2022 figure includes a structural break in state reporting: charter entities began appearing in district-level data that year, adding students who were previously absent from parish-level counts. That reporting change inflates the apparent 2022 gain (+12,293) and means the absolute count before and after 2022 is not directly comparable.

The share trend is more telling. Because both total enrollment and Hispanic enrollment were affected by the same reporting change, the share calculation is consistent across all years: 8.4% in 2019, rising steadily to 11.5% by 2024, where it has held flat through 2026.

The plateau matters. After five years of acceleration, Hispanic enrollment dipped by 162 students in 2025 and fell by 1,961 in 2026. Whether this reflects a genuine slowdown in demographic growth, the effects of federal immigration enforcement, or simply enrollment timing remains unclear.

Jefferson Parish, still the epicenter

Jefferson Parish^↗ is the state's Hispanic enrollment center of gravity, and it is not close. With 17,239 Hispanic students in 2026, the parish accounts for nearly one in four Hispanic students statewide. Their share of Jefferson's enrollment has climbed from 31.4% to 38.0% since 2019, making Hispanic students the largest racial group in Louisiana's biggest school system. For context, Black students make up 33.7% and white students 20.6%.

Jefferson's Hispanic community has deep roots. Hondurans, Mexicans, and Cubans make up the bulk of the local population, with the Honduran share far exceeding the national average: 32% of metro-area Hispanic residents are Honduran, compared to 2% nationally. The community's growth accelerated after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 when Central American construction workers arrived to rebuild the region, and many stayed. The parish's Hispanic population more than doubled between 2000 and 2024, reaching 86,663 residents.

But Jefferson's Hispanic enrollment actually declined by 1,466 students between 2024 and 2026, from 18,705 to 17,239. Its absolute gain since 2019 (+1,351) is now smaller than Livingston Parish's.

Suburban parishes are the new growth corridor

The fastest Hispanic enrollment growth is not in the traditional gateway parish. It is spreading into the Baton Rouge suburbs and Northshore.

Livingston Parish^↗ leads the state in absolute Hispanic growth: 1,503 new students since 2019, a 68.9% increase that lifted the Hispanic share from 8.3% to 14.0%. St. Tammany Parish^↗ added 1,183 (+39.7%), pushing its share from 7.7% to 11.8%. Ascension Parish^↗ gained 949 (+41.3%), reaching 13.9%.

These are not parishes that had large Hispanic populations a decade ago. They are suburban, predominantly white communities along the I-10 and I-12 corridors that are experiencing the same demographic transformation Jefferson Parish underwent a generation earlier. Tangipahoa Parish^↗ went from 6.8% to 11.1% Hispanic. Lafayette Parish^↗ crossed 12%.

The growth reaches north Louisiana too. Bossier Parish^↗ gained 561 Hispanic students, and Caddo added 412. Even parishes with small base populations saw percentage jumps: Zachary Community School District's Hispanic enrollment rose 160%, from 111 to 289 students. St. Landry Parish grew 84.4%.

East Baton Rouge Parish^↗ added 883 Hispanic students, pushing its share from 11.5% to 15.0%. In a parish where Hispanic students now outnumber white students (15.0% vs. 10.9%), the shift has operational weight. EBR is one of four parishes where Hispanic enrollment exceeds white enrollment, alongside Jefferson, St. John the Baptist, and Baker.

A composition shift, not just a count

White enrollment fell by 37,717 students statewide, a 12.4% decline that dropped the white share from 47.1% to 40.2%. Hispanic enrollment grew by 21,935. Multiracial enrollment grew by 8,002 (+41.7%). These are the three largest shifts in the racial composition of Louisiana's schools over seven years.

The share trend captures what the absolute count cannot: even at 11.5%, Hispanic students are now a larger presence in Louisiana schools than Asian, multiracial, Native American, and Pacific Islander students combined. And Hispanic births account for 10.2% of all Louisiana births (2021-2023 average), suggesting the school-age share will continue rising as these cohorts enter kindergarten.

Immigration and the teacher pipeline

The most likely driver of Hispanic enrollment growth is immigration, both international and domestic. Louisiana received an estimated 23,000 new international immigrants between 2023 and 2024 alone, and an additional 15,000 between 2020 and 2023 that were not captured in earlier estimates. International immigration is now the only source of population growth in a state that loses more residents to domestic out-migration than it gains.

"As 'natural increase' in the U.S. continues to fall, immigrants will play an increasingly large role in population stability or growth." — The Data Center, 2024

Separately, English learner enrollment, which overlaps heavily with Hispanic students, grew by 8,090 students statewide between 2019 and 2026, a 32.5% increase. The state has the largest percentage increase in EL enrollment of any state over the prior decade: 153% between 2010 and 2021, according to New America's analysis of federal data. Louisiana's existing teaching workforce was not built for this. The state's first alternative certification program for EL teachers did not seek approval until October 2025.

The 2025-2026 dip in Hispanic enrollment (-2,123 students across both years) occurred during a period of heightened federal immigration enforcement. Whether this reflects families leaving the state, withdrawing children from public schools, or something unrelated to policy is not determinable from enrollment data alone.

A staffing gap the data can measure

Jefferson Parish, with 38% Hispanic enrollment, has had decades to build bilingual programs and hire ESL-certified teachers. Its Office of Multilingual Learning serves students speaking Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic, and Korean. The infrastructure exists, even if it strains under a 19.2% English learner rate.

Parishes like Livingston (14% Hispanic), St. Tammany (11.8%), and Ascension (13.9%) have no such runway. These are communities where the Hispanic share was in the single digits five years ago. Louisiana's first alternative certification program for EL teachers did not seek approval until October 2025. The students are already sitting in classrooms. The credentialed teachers to serve them are, in many parishes, still in a pipeline that barely exists.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.