Caddo Parish - EdTribune LA - Louisiana Education Data

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 Eight Louisiana Students Now Attends a Charter School

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Louisiana 2025-26 Enrollment.

In five years of comparable data, Louisiana's charter sector has added 6,914 students. Its traditional parishes have lost 32,171. Both facts describe the same state, the same years, and the same funding formula. The difference is which direction each line points.

Charter entities enrolled 81,717 students in 2025-26, or 12.4% of the state's public school total. That is up from 10.9% in 2021-22, the first year Louisiana reported charter entities as distinct districts. The 1.5 percentage-point gain may sound modest, but it masks an asymmetry: charter enrollment grew 9.2% over the period while traditional enrollment fell 5.3%.

The shape of the charter sector

Louisiana's charter landscape is unusual. Five entities, each reported as a district-level unit, account for all charter enrollment in the state data. Two of them dominate.

Orleans Parish^↗, the all-charter aggregate representing New Orleans public schools, is the largest at 43,182 students. It has been shrinking, down 722 students (1.6%) since 2022, reflecting the city's ongoing demographic contraction. Type 2 Charters^↗, the BESE-authorized schools that can enroll students from anywhere in the state, is second at 36,673 students, up 31.3% from 27,921 in 2022. The remaining three entities are small: Recovery School District-Baton Rouge (902), Recovery School District-LDE (742), and Office of Juvenile Justice (218).

The growth story is almost entirely a Type 2 story. These BESE-authorized schools added 8,752 students in five years, more than offsetting the combined declines of every other charter entity. Type 2 enrollment jumped from 27,921 to 30,693 between 2022 and 2023, then to 34,049 in 2024, before plateauing at 34,060 in 2025 and surging again to 36,673 in 2026.

Traditional parishes: only seven grew

While the charter sector expanded, 67 of 76 traditional parishes lost students between 2022 and 2026. The losses were broad-based. East Baton Rouge Parish^↗ lost the most in absolute terms, shedding 2,652 students (6.5%). Lafayette Parish^↗ lost 2,422 (7.7%). Jefferson Parish^↗ lost 2,023 (4.3%). St. Tammany Parish^↗ and Caddo Parish^↗ each lost roughly 1,700.

Only seven traditional parishes gained enrollment over the period. Calcasieu Parish^↗ was the standout, adding 783 students (2.8%), possibly reflecting post-hurricane recovery in the Lake Charles area. The others added between 6 and 107 students each.

The year-over-year pattern is striking. Traditional parishes lost 5,925 students in 2023, 8,047 in 2024, moderated to 2,775 in 2025, then plunged 15,424 in 2026, the largest single-year traditional loss on record. Charter enrollment, by contrast, gained in three of four years, dipping only slightly in 2025 (by 175 students) before rebounding by 1,972 in 2026.

What a growing charter share does not tell you

Charter share can rise for two reasons: charter enrollment grows, or total enrollment shrinks. In Louisiana, both are happening simultaneously, which makes the share gain partly mechanical. If charter enrollment had stayed flat at its 2022 level while traditional enrollment fell by 32,171, charter share would have risen from 10.9% to 11.4% on traditional losses alone. The actual charter share of 12.4% reflects genuine charter growth on top of that compositional shift.

The distinction matters for policy. A charter sector that grows by attracting new students into public education is different from one that grows by absorbing a larger fraction of a contracting pie. Louisiana's data cannot distinguish between these mechanisms at the state level. Some portion of Type 2 charter growth likely represents families leaving traditional parishes, but without student-level transfer data, the share attributable to transfers versus new enrollment versus families who would otherwise homeschool or attend private school remains unknown.

The New Orleans paradox

New Orleans operates as an almost entirely charter system, yet its enrollment is declining. Orleans Parish lost 722 students between 2022 and 2026, a trend driven by falling birth rates rather than sector competition. New Schools for New Orleans, a nonprofit that tracks the city's school landscape, has documented that the city's kindergarten class is the smallest in over a decade, 16% smaller than in 2014, and that only 86% of available school seats are filled.

"Around 700 fewer babies were born in New Orleans in 2020 than in 2015." — New Schools for New Orleans

The city's charter schools have begun consolidating in response. InspireNOLA, one of the larger charter management organizations, merged two schools into a single campus in 2024 to reduce empty seats by 500 across the system.

BESE authorization and the GATOR factor

Type 2 charter growth depends on BESE's willingness to authorize new schools and expand existing ones. Louisiana law defines Type 2 charters as schools chartered directly with BESE that can enroll students from across the state, giving them a geographic reach that locally authorized charters lack. LDOE's charter school program grant application materials target new seats in districts where schools have been rated academically unacceptable for three or more years, rural districts, and areas where public school choice options are limited.

A separate pressure on traditional enrollment may come from the LA GATOR Scholarship Program, the state's first education savings account, which launched in 2025-26 with approximately 6,000 participating students and $43.5 million in funding. GATOR recipients leave the public school enrollment count entirely, removing both the student and the per-pupil funding. The program is set to expand eligibility in phases through 2027-28, which could accelerate traditional enrollment loss without appearing in charter enrollment figures.

What to watch

The charter sector's 2025 dip, when it lost 175 students year-over-year before rebounding by 1,972 in 2026, is worth monitoring. If traditional losses continue at their 2026 pace of 15,424 per year while charter enrollment grows at roughly 2,000, charter share would cross 14% by 2028. That would still leave Louisiana below national leaders like Arizona and Florida, but it would represent a structural shift in how the state delivers public education.

In New Orleans, where InspireNOLA merged two campuses in 2024 to eliminate 500 empty seats, the charter sector is demonstrating one of its structural advantages: it can close a school without a community meeting or a board vote that dominates local news for weeks. Parish school boards in Caddo, Jefferson, and East Baton Rouge have all faced angry parents and civil rights complaints over school closures driven by the same enrollment math. The charter sector's ability to open and close schools by design is a flexibility that traditional parishes, bound to existing campuses and attendance zones, do not share.

That flexibility will matter more as the pie continues to shrink. Under the Minimum Foundation Program, funding follows students. Every student who leaves a traditional parish for a Type 2 charter, a GATOR-funded private school, or another state takes per-pupil dollars with them. The charter sector's 12.4% share is small enough to be manageable. Its direction -- up, in every year but one -- is not.

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

Caddo Parish Has Lost Students Every Year for Seven Years

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

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.

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

Louisiana Has Lost Students Every Year for Seven Years

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Louisiana 2025-26 Enrollment.

Of Louisiana's 74 traditional parishes with complete enrollment records stretching back to 2019, six managed to hold steady or gain students over those seven years. Six out of 74. Livingston Parish^↗ added 232. Ascension Parish added 13. The other 68 parishes lost ground, and the state as a whole shed 65,354 students from its traditional public schools, a decline of 10.1%.

There has not been a single year of recovery. Not after the worst of COVID passed. Not after the economy reopened. Every year from 2020 through 2026 posted a loss, and the 2025-26 school year brought the steepest post-pandemic drop yet: 15,424 students gone in a single year, a 2.6% decline.

The acceleration no one expected

The annual losses followed a pattern that, until this year, suggested stabilization. The largest single-year drop came in 2019-20, when 19,459 students disappeared, a loss that predates COVID and reflects structural population decline already underway. The pandemic year (2020-21) added another 8,688 to the deficit. From there, losses decelerated: 5,036 in 2022, 5,925 in 2023. By 2024-25, the annual loss had shrunk to just 2,775, less than half a percent. Superintendents across the state had reason to believe the worst was over.

Then 2025-26 arrived. The 15,424-student loss is more than five times larger than the previous year's drop and the second-largest annual loss in the eight-year data window. Only the 2019-20 figure was worse.

The pattern resembles what engineers call a dead cat bounce. After a sharp initial drop, the system appeared to recover, losses shrank, and a brief plateau formed. But the underlying structural forces never reversed. They compounded. And the 2026 collapse suggests the plateau was not a floor but a pause.

Where the students disappeared

The losses are not concentrated in any one corner of the state. Caddo Parish^↗, anchoring northwest Louisiana, lost 5,611 students since 2019, a 14.8% decline. Jefferson Parish^↗, the state's largest traditional district, lost 5,160 (10.2%). East Baton Rouge Parish^↗ lost 3,629 (8.7%). Of the 10 largest parishes by enrollment, every single one recorded its lowest enrollment in the data window in 2026.

Statewide, 55 of 75 traditional parishes, 73.3%, hit all-time lows this year.

The rate of loss varies geographically but the direction does not. Small rural parishes in north and central Louisiana lost the highest percentages: West Carroll Parish dropped 29.4%, Catahoula Parish 28.0%, and the City of Bogalusa school system 27.6%. In a state where per-pupil funding follows students, each departure compounds the fiscal strain on the students who remain.

Calcasieu Parish^↗ stands out as a partial exception. After Hurricane Laura devastated Lake Charles in August 2020 and drove enrollment down by 3,614 students in a single year, the parish partially recovered, climbing from a low of 27,681 in 2021 back to 28,654 in 2026. But even with that recovery, Calcasieu remains 3,225 students below its 2019 level, a 10.1% decline.

An emptying pipeline

The age structure of the loss points to a problem that will not self-correct. Kindergarten enrollment across traditional parishes fell from 48,556 in 2019 to 41,885 in 2026, a 13.7% decline. Grade 12 enrollment fell by just 4.5% over the same period. The ratio of kindergartners to 12th graders dropped from 120 to 108. Fewer children are entering the system than are exiting it, and the gap between inflows and outflows is not narrowing.

This means the current losses are locked in for at least a decade. A student who did not enter kindergarten in 2025 will not appear in first grade in 2026 or in 12th grade in 2037. The pipeline is shrinking from the bottom, and the larger graduating classes of the next several years will widen the gap further before it has any chance of closing.

Three forces, one direction

No single factor explains a 65,000-student decline. The most likely drivers are reinforcing each other.

The strongest evidence points to population loss. Louisiana lost more than 84,000 residents between 2020 and 2023, with its population peaking at 4.65 million in 2020 and declining each year through 2023. In 2024, population dropped in two-thirds of Louisiana's parishes, with Caddo and Orleans among the top five counties nationally for losses among those with 100,000 or more residents. Allison Plyer, chief demographer at The Data Center, put it bluntly:

"Louisiana has had one of the weakest economies in the country for decades now. It's not surprising that we're losing population." -- Red River Radio, March 2025

State Superintendent Cade Brumley has framed the decline as demographic rather than educational, telling The Advocate that "the drop in enrollment isn't necessarily an educational issue" and that "people are leaving the state." The Census data supports this interpretation, but it is not the only factor.

Homeschooling has also grown steadily. The state registered roughly 13,672 homeschool students in 2019 and 17,241 in 2024, a 74% increase over the past decade that now accounts for about 6% of school-aged children. That gain of roughly 3,500 students since 2019 explains a fraction of the 65,000 lost. It is a contributing factor, not the primary one.

The newest variable is school choice policy. Louisiana's LA GATOR Scholarship Program, a universal education savings account launched in 2025, replaces the existing voucher program that served roughly 5,500 students. Phase 1 is limited to families earning under 250% of the federal poverty level, incoming kindergarteners, and students transferring from public schools. The program is too new to appear in the enrollment data analyzed here, but its phased expansion to universal eligibility could accelerate the decline in subsequent years.

What New Orleans reveals

The fiscal consequences of sustained enrollment decline are already visible in New Orleans, where the all-charter system has watched enrollment fall for years. WWNO reported in February 2025 that nine schools had at least 20% of their seats empty, and nine schools had already closed.

"We're gonna end up with neighborhoods that don't have a school." -- Carlos Zervigon, New Orleans school board member, WWNO, February 2025

Because Louisiana funds schools on a per-pupil basis, enrollment loss creates a compounding problem: fixed costs for facilities, transportation, and administration do not shrink proportionally with the student body. A parish that loses 500 students does not lose 500 students' worth of building maintenance or bus routes. The 9,336 students Louisiana's traditional parishes are losing annually, on average, is roughly the enrollment of a mid-size parish like Vernon or St. Bernard.

Counting backward from the cliff

The 2026 cliff shattered any assumption that Louisiana's enrollment decline was decelerating toward a soft landing. The state lost more students this year than in any single year since the initial COVID shock, and the kindergarten pipeline offers no sign that incoming cohorts will reverse the trajectory.

At the seven-year average pace of roughly 9,300 lost per year, Louisiana's traditional public schools would fall below 550,000 students by 2030. At the 2026 pace, they would get there by 2028. Either way, the Minimum Foundation Program's base per-pupil amount has not budged since 2019, and the $47 increase now before the legislature would be the first in 17 years. Parish superintendents are not managing a downturn. They are managing a permanent contraction, and the funding formula has not caught up.

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

Louisiana Publishes 2025-26 Enrollment Data

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Louisiana 2025-26 Enrollment.

A year ago, Louisiana's traditional parish school systems lost 2,775 students — less than half a percent, a decline small enough that superintendents across the state could call it stabilization. After the post-COVID freefall of 2020 and 2021, after three years of gradually shrinking annual losses, the trajectory looked like it was finally flattening. The worst appeared to be over.

Then the Louisiana Department of Education released its February 2026 enrollment data, and the floor disappeared: 578,632 students in traditional parish school systems, down 15,424 from the prior year. That is the largest single-year loss outside of COVID in the eight-year data window — more than five times the previous year's decline. Whatever floor people thought they saw last year was not a floor.

What the numbers open up

The enrollment data covers 75 traditional parishes and 5 charter entities, from the Gulf Coast to the Arkansas border. Over the coming weeks, The LAEdTribune will unpack it in a series of data-driven articles. Here is what jumps out first.

Louisiana has lost students every year for seven years. Traditional parish enrollment fell from 643,986 in 2019 to 578,632 in 2026 — a decline of 65,354 students, or 10.1%. There has not been a single year of recovery. The 2026 cliff did not start a new trend. It accelerated one that never paused.

Three in four parishes just hit record lows. Fifty-five of 75 traditional parishes recorded their lowest enrollment in the data window in 2026. This is not a story about New Orleans or Baton Rouge. It is statewide.

Caddo Parish^↗ has lost students every year for seven years. Northwest Louisiana's largest district shed 5,611 students since 2019, a 14.8% decline, with losses accelerating in 2026.

By the numbers: 578,632 students in traditional parishes in 2025-26 — down 15,424 from the prior year, a 2.6% decline and the lowest total in the eight-year data window.

The threads we are following

Louisiana's white student share fell below 40%. White enrollment dropped from 47.1% of the traditional total in 2019 to 40.2% in 2026, while Hispanic enrollment surged 40.8% to reach 76,000 students. The demographic composition of Louisiana's schools is shifting faster than most policy frameworks account for.

One in eight students now attends a charter school. Charter enrollment reached 12.4% of the statewide total in 2026, up from 10.9% in 2022, with Type 2 Charters growing 31.3%. The charter sector is gaining share even as the overall pie shrinks.

Seven in ten students are economically disadvantaged. The statewide rate hit 70.1%, with several parishes reporting above 95% — CEP artifacts that reveal how deeply concentrated poverty has become in Louisiana's school systems.

What comes next

This is the first in a series of articles examining what the 2025-26 enrollment data reveals about Louisiana public schools. New articles publish weekly on Wednesdays.

The enrollment figures come from LDOE Enrollment Data. The data covers headcount enrollment for public school parishes and charter entities statewide.

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