Student enrollment continued to decline for the 2023-2024 school year according to recently released data from the Connecticut State Department of Education (CSDE). In the past ten years, enrollment has dropped by 33,697 students.
Enrollment reflects the number of students who attend Connecticut schools and is reported at the district level. Attendance levels at private educational institutions are not included in the data.
In the 2014-2015 school year, enrollment for all students was 546,349. For the 2023-2024 school year, enrollment was 512,652. Over the past decade, overall enrollment has decreased each year, except for the 2021-2022 school year, which saw a slight increase over the previous year.
The largest drop in enrollment came between the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school years when the state closed schools in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020-2021, overall enrollment dropped by 14,750 students: down to 513,079 in 2020-2021 from 527,829 in 2019-2020.
While enrollment increased to 513,615 in 2021-2022, it has declined for the past two school years, although at a slower pace. Between the 2021-2022 and 2023-2024 school years, enrollment has declined by approximately 482 students per year on average. Between the 2014-2015 and 2019-2020 school years, enrollment declined by an average of 3,704 students per year.
By grade, kindergarten and pre-kindergarten (pre-k) experienced the largest drops in enrollment between the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school years. Enrollment for kindergarten students has followed a similar enrollment pattern as overall enrollment since: growing between 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 and declining in the past 2 years.
Enrollment for kindergarten dropped from 6.93 percent of overall enrollment in 2019-2020 to 6.29 percent of overall enrollment in 2020-2021. The following year, in 2021-2022, it climbed to 6.96 percent. For the 2022-2023 school year, it stood at 6.78 percent and at 6.74 percent in 2023-2024.
Pre-k enrollment has climbed since 2020-2021 and, as of the 2023-2024 school year, exceeds pre-pandemic enrollment levels. In 2019-2020, pre-k enrollments made up 3.57 percent of overall enrollments. The following year, that level dropped to 2.98 percent. In 2021-2022, pre-k enrollment was 3.46 percent. In 2022-2023 it increased to 3.7 percent. Last year it increased to 3.81 percent.
According to CSDE’s data, English learners have also increased as a percentage of overall students each year between 2014-2015 and 2023-2024. During the 2014-2015 school year, English learners accounted for 6.39 percent of the student body. During the 2023-2024 school year, they accounted for 10.55 percent.
Students with disabilities have also increased as a portion of the student body each year, making up 13.32 percent of enrolled students in 2014-2015 and 17.92 percent in 2023-2024.
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Great reporting. Universal PreK is a majority CT governing party platform priority, so local District expansion of PREK capacity (sections) appears to be a “side door” to expanding PREK access- at the expense of private / parochial PREK alternatives. Would be important followup reporting to calculate the total offset to K-12 enrollment decline due to total additional PREK public school students the past 10 years. No surprise then that PreK shows the only enrollment “growth”. Also, Open Choice program participation by District would seem to warrant some follow-up reporting as well. Obviously, this is an enrollment total “wash” across participating Districts. But the plans and trends in participation seem essential to the question of how to best manage increasing Statewide excess public school building capacity given decades of falling enrollment, which is accelerating with historically low birth and fertility rates. In Weston for example, one of the 4 public school buildings is now privately acknowledged by local government leaders as entirely “Extra” in official work documents. Due to the increasingly underutilized school building capacity, Weston schools Central Office appears to be quietly expanding Open Choice participation to fill “empty seats” (among other compelling reasons).