Initial district and charter enrollment by the numbers

Last week, I analyzed the first monthly report of 2020-21 public school enrollment data from the NC Department of Public Instruction. Comparing that report to its 2019-20 equivalent, I found that district enrollment dropped by 5.0%, and a portion of that loss was offset by the 7.3% increase in charter school enrollment.

Available data offer more questions than answers. What accounted for the extraordinary net decrease in public school students? Was the risk of their child contracting COVID-19 parents’ primary concern? Were there differences by region, demographics, or reopening strategy? Researchers will contemplate these and many other questions for years to come.

District dive

The first-month enrollment report indicates that only two North Carolina school districts added students: Elkin City Schools and Mount Airy City Schools, both located in Surry County. All others had a net loss of students. The range of losses varied significantly. The median decrease in first-month average daily membership across all 113 remaining school districts was 4.69%. On the low end, Kannapolis City registered a paltry 1.2% decrease. On the high end, Guilford County had a massive 16.5% drop in enrollment. According to the Greensboro News & Record, “biggest drops in kindergarten enrollment for Guilford County Schools came from the most and least affluent schools.”

Table 1. Month 1 Average Daily Membership by District

Note: Data for this table were compiled by EducationNC and is available here. The original source of the data is the NC Department of Public Instruction and is available here.

Kindergarten conundrum

Kindergarteners constituted a substantial share of the district enrollment loss. As Brian Gordon of USA Today Network points out, “The 13% decrease in kindergarten was the largest enrollment drop of any grade level. And while public school enrollment has plummeted across the board this year, with 62,000 fewer students, kindergarten accounts for nearly a quarter of the total decrease.” So, where did they go?

Some speculate that school reopening chaos prompted parents of kindergarten-age children to “redshirt” their precious tykes. North Carolina’s compulsory attendance law does not mandate school enrollment until the child turns seven years old. This allows parents to delay or “redshirt” the initial registration of their child in public school. Because the available enrollment report simply tabulates the average daily membership for each public school in the state, we simply do not know how widespread redshirting was this year.

One reason to doubt the redshirt explanation is that it requires tremendous resources. To redshirt a child, parents need to pay for an additional year of childcare, have the option of working from home, or have the ability to forgo income. Indeed, empirical studies of the phenomenon find that redshirting is less common among economically disadvantagedand nonwhite families.

Redshirting is one possibility. Enrolling children in schools of choice is another.

Charter schools

The first-month enrollment report shows that kindergarten enrollment in charter increased by 7% or nearly 700 students compared with last year, so some of the district loss was charters’ gain. Home and private schools may have enjoyed similar increases, but enrollment figures for nonpublic schools will not be available until the end of the fiscal year, so it is impossible to know for sure.

Table 2. Month 1 Average Daily Membership by Charter School

Source: NC Department of Public Instruction
Note: The Coronavirus Relief Act 3.0 increased seats for North Carolina’s two virtual charter schools. Lawmakers authorized the NC Cyber Academy to increase its enrollment by 1,000 students, and the NC Virtual Academy can add up to 2,800 additional students for the current school year.

Only around one-quarter of North Carolina charter schools posted enrollment losses. Concord Lake STEAM Academy in Kannapolis had the sharpest decline, while enrollment at Bonnie Cone Classical Academy in Huntersville surged.

A cursory review of the data offers few patterns or common characteristics of note. The only generalization that I will venture is that charter schools were not universal beneficiaries of district enrollment losses. For example, the Guilford County Schools had an approximately 11,600 student loss, but charter schools in the county added only 660 students. Even if we assume that charters in neighboring counties absorbed additional Guilford County students, it means that thousands of students are unaccounted for (at least for now).

What’s next?

As I wrote in my previous article, enrollment differences between the first month and subsequent months can number in the thousands, depending on the number of families who choose to enroll, transfer, or withdraw from public schools during the initial weeks of school. Second-month enrollment figures tend to provide a more accurate student count, but it is not known when the NC Department of Public Instruction will release those data.