Only 7 of 74 Louisiana Parishes Have Recovered From COVID

Wed, 20 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Louisiana 2025-26 Enrollment.

Livingston Parish gained 232 students between 2019 and 2026. That makes it the most successful COVID recovery story in Louisiana. The second-best, West Baton Rouge Parish, added 168. The two parishes sit side by side on the east bank of the Mississippi, and together they account for nearly 70% of all the net enrollment growth across every traditional parish in the state.

The other 67 parishes never came back.

Of the 74 traditional parishes with complete enrollment data for both 2019 and 2026, just seven have returned to or exceeded their pre-COVID levels, a recovery rate of 9.5%. The 67 non-recovered parishes are collectively short 65,754 students below their 2019 levels, and for most, the gap is widening: 55 parishes hit their lowest enrollment on record in 2026.

Seven years of unbroken decline

Traditional parish enrollment in Louisiana fell from 643,986 in 2019 to 578,632 in 2026, a loss of 65,354 students, or 10.1%. The decline has never paused. Every year since 2019 has been lower than the one before, with losses ranging from 2,775 (in 2025) to 19,459 (in the first pandemic year of 2020).

The 2026 drop of 15,424 students is the second-largest in this window, smaller only than the initial pandemic shock, and nearly six times the previous year's loss. After what looked like a slowing of the bleeding in 2025, Louisiana's traditional enrollment fell off a cliff.

The recovered seven

The seven parishes that have returned to 2019 levels share little in common besides geography. Ascension Parish, the second-largest of the group at 23,422 students, sits just 13 students above its 2019 level. A bad month could erase its recovery entirely. Three of the seven are specialty institutions with fewer than 1,000 students: the Special School District (+103), Southern University Lab School (+38), and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (flat at 234).

Only Livingston (+232, or 0.9%) and West Baton Rouge (+168, or 4.2%) recorded gains large enough to represent genuine growth rather than statistical noise.

Recovery rates vary sharply by parish size. None of the 25 mid-size parishes (5,000 to 20,000 students) have recovered, a 0% rate. Two of 10 large parishes (20,000+) recovered. The highest recovery rate, 42.9%, belongs to the smallest tier, parishes under 1,000 students, but three of seven recovering in that group is an artifact of tiny denominators and specialty institutions.

Where the losses are deepest

Six parishes have each lost more than 3,000 students since 2019. Caddo Parish, which includes Shreveport, leads with a deficit of 5,611, a 14.8% decline. Jefferson Parish, the state's largest traditional district, lost 5,160 students (10.2%). East Baton Rouge Parish, St. Tammany Parish, Calcasieu Parish, and Lafayette Parish each lost between 3,000 and 3,700.

Together, these six parishes account for 24,049 of the 65,754-student statewide deficit, or 36.6%. But the losses are not concentrated at the top. Forty-two parishes have lost more than 10% of their 2019 enrollment. Thirty have lost more than 15%. Twelve have lost more than 20%.

The percentage losses are steepest in smaller southern parishes. Iberia Parish is down 16.4% (2,046 students). Terrebonne Parish has lost 15.9% (2,737). St. Mary Parish is down 18.5%, the worst rate among parishes with at least 5,000 students in 2019.

Decline without a floor

For most parishes, 2026 did not just fail to bring recovery. It brought new lows. Fifty-five of the 74 parishes recorded their lowest enrollment of the 2019-2026 period in the most recent year. That means for 74.3% of traditional parishes, enrollment is not stabilizing, it is still falling.

Of the 75 parishes reporting in 2026, 67 lost students compared to the prior year. Sixty-five saw their decline accelerate, losing more students in the 2025-to-2026 transition than in the 2024-to-2025 transition.

Even the recovered parishes are losing altitude. Ascension peaked at 24,138 in 2023 and has shed 716 students since. Livingston peaked at 27,105 in 2023 and dropped 725. Both are still technically above their 2019 baselines, but the margin is shrinking.

No parish came within 2% of recovery without clearing it, meaning the gap between recovered and not is binary, not gradual. The nearest miss is Rapides Parish at -8.8%, which is not close at all.

Fewer births, fewer families, new exits

The most likely driver of Louisiana's enrollment collapse is demographic: the state is producing fewer school-age children. Louisiana recorded just over 52,000 births in 2024, down from more than 63,000 in 2013, a 17% decline in 11 years. The primary cause is not lower fertility rates but outmigration of women in their prime child-bearing years.

"The reason for the decline in birth is because of a decline in the female population of child-bearing age." Allison Plyer, chief demographer, The Data Center, New Orleans

Plyer has warned the effect will ripple: "It will have impact on schools; it will have impacts on hospitals and will have impacts on all kinds of institutions and facilities and businesses across the state."

School choice programs represent a second, newer channel. Louisiana's LA GATOR Education Savings Account program, which launched in the 2025-26 school year, received 39,189 applications and deemed nearly 35,000 students eligible. Governor Jeff Landry's budget request of $93 million would fund roughly 12,000 participants. The program replaced the older Louisiana Scholarship Program, which served about 5,000 students, so the net new exits from public schools may be smaller than the headline application figure suggests, though the full enrollment impact will not be visible until 2027 data.

Operational fallout

The per-pupil funding formula amplifies the pain of declining enrollment. Louisiana's Minimum Foundation Program has used a base amount of $4,015 per student since 2019, with no increase until a proposed $47 bump now before the legislature, which would be the first since 2008.

"School leaders have been sounding the alarm for years about inflation and the impact of declining enrollment on fixed costs, since schools are funded on a per-pupil basis." Source: WWNO, March 2026

The Louisiana Department of Education expects enrollment to fall by another 12,000 to 13,000 students in the next fiscal year, which would translate to roughly $42 million less in state spending.

Parishes are responding with closures. Caddo Parish closed three elementary schools in 2025-26 after losing roughly 1,000 students per year for more than a decade. School Board President Jasmine Green acknowledged the system had dropped from 42,000 to 33,000 students and said, "we have to make the adjustments with the changing student population." Jefferson Parish consolidated six schools and built two new campuses in 2023, with more consolidations expected. East Baton Rouge approved a realignment plan in 2025 that closed five schools and consolidated several more, affecting over 10,000 students, after anticipating a $5.6 million funding drop from lower enrollment.

In New Orleans, where the all-charter system faces similar demographic headwinds, district data chief Max Daigh put it bluntly: "The district can't enroll kids who don't exist."

The blueprint that does not exist

The seven recovered parishes offer no model for the rest. They are either suburban Baton Rouge bedroom communities (Livingston, Ascension, West Baton Rouge) that benefit from spillover growth, or specialty institutions insulated from parish-level demographic forces. Neither model scales.

And even those success stories are fragile. Ascension sits 13 students above its 2019 level. A single bad enrollment count would remove it from the recovered list. Livingston peaked in 2023 and has shed 725 students since.

The 67 parishes still below 2019 levels need to budget, staff, and maintain buildings for a student body that has not stopped shrinking since before the pandemic. The Department of Education expects another 12,000 to 13,000 students to disappear next year. That would push traditional parish enrollment below 570,000 -- less than 89% of its 2019 level -- and extend the unbroken decline to eight consecutive years.

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