Florida Schools Won’t Hit Pre-pandemic Enrollment in Next Decade, Economists Say

This article was originally published in Florida Phoenix.

A state forecast indicates Florida schools will experience declining enrollment in five of the next six years, with the one positive year representing less than a 0.1% increase.

The student enrollment f orecast from the state Office of Economic and Demographic Research predicts that 12,379 fewer students will attend traditional public schools during the 2024-2025 school year, a 0.5% drop from 2.366 million to 2.354 million.

The numbers do not include students receiving scholarships to attend nonpublic schools, home-based students, students in the juvenile justice system, and other groups.

The new school year will mark the fifth full school year since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first year after the start of the pandemic, 2020-2021, the state saw 6.1% fewer students in school. Since then, enrollment has increased by 2.6% in 2021-2022 and 1.4% in 2022-2023.

According to forecaster Elisabeth Goodman, the enrollment during the most recent school year reflects a leveling out since the COVID-19 pandemic.

“What we’re seeing … is stabilization when it comes to students choosing which setting they’re going to be in, especially when it comes to district virtual and [Florida Virtual School], it looks like the students who were going to return to brick and mortar have, as we see, that they have stabilized in 2023-2024 relative to 2022-2023,” Goodman said during a June estimating meeting.

Some of those students came back to the districts, but the number is not expected to rebound to pre-pandemic levels in the next 10 years, according to the forecast.

State forecasters within the Education Estimating Conference project that enrollment will increase by tenths of 1% annually between 2030 and 2035, the furthest the forecast extends. The 2034-2035 forecast foresees nearly 100,000 fewer students than pre-pandemic enrollment.

In that same time, Florida’s population has grown from 21.5 million in 2020 to 23 million in 2024 and is projected to hit 25.7 million in 2034, well above pre-pandemic numbers.

Students have opted to attend private schools and charter schools at higher rates in recent years due to school choice programs enacted by the state Legislature and the governor that provide taxpayer funded scholarships for that purpose. These programs go toward tuition and other educational costs for students to attend private schools, or to be home schooled.

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