Rapides 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.

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.