Jefferson 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 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.

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.

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.