Baltimore City - EdTribune MD - Maryland Education Data

Nearly Half of Baltimore City Students Are Chronically Absent

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction (April 12, 2026): An earlier version of this article reported the statewide chronic absenteeism average as 26.2%; the correct figure is 26.7%. The gap between Baltimore City and the state average has been corrected from 22.5 to 22.0 percentage points.

This is part of The MDEdTribune's series on Maryland's chronic absenteeism data.

In Frederick County, about 17 out of every 100 students are chronically absent. Sixty miles east on Interstate 70, in Baltimore City^↗, that number is 49.

The 48.7% chronic absenteeism rate in Baltimore City Public Schools means that nearly one in two students misses at least 10% of the school year. No other Maryland county comes close. Dorchester County, at 38.3%, is the second-highest -- a distant 10.4 points behind. The state average sits at 26.7%.

Baltimore City's rate is not just the worst in Maryland. It exists on a different scale. The gap between Baltimore City and the state average -- 22.0 percentage points -- is wider than the gap between the state average and the lowest-absence county in the state.

A 31.9-point spread

Maryland is a geographically small state. The 60 miles between Frederick and Baltimore traverse one of the nation's wealthiest corridors, passing through Howard County -- the second-lowest absence rate at 17.3% -- on the way. The 31.9 percentage-point gap between Frederick's 16.8% and Baltimore City's 48.7% represents one of the widest county-level attendance divides in any state.

Five counties exceed 30%: Baltimore City (48.7%), Dorchester^↗ (38.3%), Allegany^↗ (36.4%), Somerset^↗ (33.5%), and Prince George's^↗ (32.7%). Only three are below 20%: Frederick^↗ (16.8%), Howard^↗ (17.3%), and Calvert^↗ (18.5%). The median county sits at 25.6%, meaning half of Maryland's counties have more than a quarter of their students chronically absent.

What the web research shows

The Maryland State Department of Education's January 2025 State Board presentation provides context the statewide data cannot: at the high school level, Black students have a 40.9% chronic rate, Hispanic students 46.4%, economically disadvantaged students 49.9%, and multilingual learners 51.0%. These subgroup rates are available only from the presentation, not from the data package, and represent a single year (2023-24). They are editorial context, not verifiable R-package data.

But they sketch a picture of who, specifically, is missing school in Baltimore City: a district that is 76% Black and where 84% of students qualify for free or reduced-price meals.

James McHenry Elementary/Middle School, according to Baltimore City Public Schools reporting, achieved the highest overall decrease in chronic absenteeism in the district through a home-visit program and attendance monitoring system. Poverty, the district has consistently identified, is the predominant root cause.

The shape of the crisis

Baltimore City's 48.7% represents an improvement from its own peak. According to MSDE presentations, the rate reached approximately 58% in 2021-22, meaning the district has clawed back roughly 9 percentage points in two years. That is meaningful progress in absolute terms, faster than the state's pace of improvement.

But at 48.7%, Baltimore City still has nearly half its students chronically absent. The district is improving from a level that no other Maryland county has ever reached.

Maryland's attendance challenge is often described as a statewide problem. The data says otherwise. It is a problem concentrated in one city, replicated at smaller scale in a handful of rural counties, and largely absent from the suburban corridor that dominates the state's politics and resources. Remove Baltimore City from the state average and the chronic rate drops to roughly 21%. Add it back and the rate jumps to 26.7%. One school district, 60 miles from the lowest-rate county, accounts for nearly half the gap between where Maryland is and where it wants to be.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Maryland's 9th Grade Bottleneck

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT

This is part of The MDEdTribune's series on Maryland's 2025-26 enrollment data.

In a state where every other grade transition moves students forward in predictable numbers, one stands out. Maryland's 9th grade enrolled 75,813 students in 2025-26, 14.1% more than the 66,456 eighth graders who preceded them. That is 9,357 students who were not in Maryland's public middle schools the year before but appeared in its public high schools.

The pattern is not new. It is not a one-year anomaly. For every year in the dataset going back to 2016, Maryland's 9th grade class has been larger than the 8th grade class that fed it. The surplus has never dropped below 6,500 students and, during the pandemic, it swelled past 13,000.

The one transition that breaks the pattern

Look at the full pipeline of grade-to-grade transitions for the 2024-to-2025 school year and the 8th-to-9th jump is immediately visible. Every other step in the K-12 progression hovers between 99% and 103%. Kindergarten to 1st grade runs at 103.4%, reflecting students who delay kindergarten entry and enroll late. The 5th-to-6th transition, when students change buildings, holds at 99.7%. The 7th-to-8th transition is 101.0%.

Then comes 8th to 9th: 117.0%.

No other transition in the system comes close. The two transitions that follow it tell the rest of the story: 9th to 10th drops to 89.2%, and 10th to 11th is 90.7%. Students flood into 9th grade, and then they begin disappearing.

A decade of surplus freshmen

Over the past 10 years, the 8th-to-9th grade ratio has ranged from 109.7% (2020) to 119.9% (2021). The pre-pandemic average, from 2016 to 2019, was 112.5%. After COVID-19, the ratio jumped to nearly 120% and has remained elevated, sitting between 114% and 119% every year since.

In absolute terms, the surplus has totaled 98,161 students across the decade, an average of 9,816 per year. The 2021 peak produced 13,775 extra 9th graders in a single year.

Where the bulge is largest

The 9th grade bulge is not uniform across Maryland's 24 school districts. In 2025, Dorchester^↗ County had the highest ratio at 137.2%, with 123 more 9th graders than it had 8th graders the year before. Talbot^↗ County followed at 131.5%.

But the largest absolute numbers come from Maryland's urban and inner-suburban districts. Baltimore City^↗ added 1,645 extra 9th graders (130.8%), Montgomery County^↗ added 2,585 (121.4%), and Prince George's County^↗ added 1,960 (119.9%). Baltimore County^↗ added 1,327 (116.4%).

At the other end, Allegany^↗ County barely registered a bulge at all: 100.6%, just four extra students. Garrett County (103.7%) and Kent County (104.4%) were similarly flat. These are small, rural districts where private school options are limited and interstate migration is minimal.

The geographic pattern is revealing. Districts adjacent to Washington, D.C. and the Baltimore metro area show the largest bulges, consistent with students transferring from private K-8 schools into public high schools or families moving across state lines at the high school transition point.

What produces 9,000 extra freshmen

Three mechanisms can inflate 9th grade enrollment beyond what the 8th grade cohort produces, and Maryland's data is consistent with all three operating simultaneously.

The first is grade retention. Students who fail to earn enough credits to advance to 10th grade are counted again as 9th graders the following year. Nationally, approximately one in five students repeats 9th grade, according to research cited by the National Center for Education Statistics. A 2005 study by Boston College researchers Anne Wheelock and Jing Miao documented that the national 9th grade bulge had tripled from 4% in 1970 to 13% by 2000, driven by rising standardized testing requirements and stricter graduation standards.

The second is private-to-public transfer. Maryland has a large nonpublic school sector. Many private and parochial schools in the state operate K-8 programs, meaning their students naturally enter public high schools at 9th grade. This transfer pattern would be particularly strong in Montgomery County, Prince George's County, and the Baltimore region, where private school density is highest.

The third is interstate migration. Maryland shares borders with Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and the District of Columbia. Families who relocate for high school, or whose children commuted across state lines for middle school, would enter the count at 9th grade. The concentration of the bulge in D.C.-adjacent districts lends some plausibility to this explanation, though no state-level data tracks the origin of incoming 9th graders.

Baltimore City's outsized bulge, consistently above 120% and peaking at 147.9% in 2021, likely reflects a stronger role for grade retention than transfer. The district's high school dropout rate hit 20.8% in 2025, a 15-year high and a 67% increase since 2021.

What reporting suggests

The pandemic amplified the bottleneck nationally. The 74 Million reported in 2022 that retention rates had doubled in some states and districts after COVID-era remote learning left students without enough credits to advance:

"Students were in ninth grade, and the COVID situation was so tough that more of them than usual didn't earn enough credits to be considered 10th graders yet." — The 74 Million, 2022

In Houston, the article noted, 18% of 9th graders repeated the year, up from a pre-pandemic rate of 10%. Maryland's data is consistent with a similar dynamic: the statewide ratio jumped from 109.7% in 2020 to 119.9% in 2021, the largest single-year increase in the dataset.

In Baltimore City, the consequences have been visible. Per-pupil spending rose from $17,320 in 2021 to $23,147 in 2025, according to Fox Baltimore, yet the dropout rate surged simultaneously. The district launched credit recovery programs in 2022 to help students who had fallen behind, but the bulge persists.

The exit side of the bottleneck

The 9th grade bulge has a mirror image: attrition. In 2025, only 89.4% of 9th graders persisted to 10th grade the following year, meaning Maryland lost 8,212 students in the transition. That attrition rate has worsened over the decade, from 93.4% in 2016 to a low of 87.7% in 2022.

The two trends move in tandem. When the bulge grows, attrition follows. The 2022 cohort that entered 9th grade at 119.9% of the prior 8th grade saw only 87.7% continue to 10th grade. The implication is that many of the surplus students who enter 9th grade do not make it to 10th.

Tracked over four years, the pipeline narrows further. Of the 83,081 students who enrolled in 9th grade in 2021-22, only 64,391 were enrolled in 12th grade four years later. That is a 77.5% persistence rate, the lowest in the dataset. For context, the 2016 cohort persisted at 87.8%.

Maryland's enrollment data cannot distinguish retained 9th graders from transfer students or new arrivals. It cannot tell whether the students who vanish between 9th and 10th grade dropped out, transferred to private school, moved to another state, or earned a GED. The aggregate numbers reveal the shape of the problem without illuminating the lives inside it.

The funding question

Under the Blueprint for Maryland's Future, the state's $3.8 billion education funding overhaul, per-pupil foundation funding follows enrollment counts. An inflated 9th grade produces more funding for high schools in one year, then a deflated 10th grade produces less the next. For districts like Baltimore City, where the bulge adds over 1,600 students and the subsequent attrition loses roughly the same number, the fiscal whiplash is real. Staff hired for a surge of freshmen are not needed two years later.

The question this data cannot answer is which fraction of those 9,357 extra 9th graders represents a policy failure and which fraction represents a structural feature of how families use Maryland's school system. If private-to-public transfers account for half the bulge, the system is working as designed: families choose private education through middle school and public education for high school. If grade retention accounts for most of it, then 9th grade is functioning as a bottleneck where thousands of students stall and many eventually leave.

The 2026-27 school year will test whether the post-COVID elevation is finally receding. The ratio has fallen from 119.9% in 2021 to 114.1% in 2025, moving back toward pre-pandemic norms. Whether it returns to the 111% range of 2016-2018 or settles at a higher new baseline will say something about how permanently the pandemic reshaped Maryland's high school pipeline.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Maryland's Kindergarten Classes Keep Shrinking

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT

This is part of The MDEdTribune's series on Maryland's 2025-26 enrollment data.

Every September, a new kindergarten class walks through the doors of Maryland's public schools. Every September for four straight years, that class has been smaller than the one before it.

Maryland enrolled 59,204 kindergartners in 2025-26, down 8.8% from the 64,930 who started school a decade ago. The decline was not sudden. Before COVID-19, K enrollment had been drifting lower for three consecutive years. The pandemic's 10.3% crash in 2020-21 briefly masked the underlying trend, and the partial bounce in 2021-22 briefly suggested recovery. It was not recovery. Since that bounce, kindergarten enrollment has dropped every single year, shedding another 2,467 students. Twenty of Maryland's 24 school systems now enroll fewer kindergartners than they did before the pandemic.

The size of a kindergarten class is not just a data point about five-year-olds. It is a forecast. Each small cohort ripples forward through elementary school, then middle school, then high school, locking in 12 years of smaller classes. Maryland's elementary grades are already feeling it: grades K through 3 have all shrunk between 6.5% and 9.7% since 2015-16, while high school grades have grown 5.4% to 10.1% over the same period. The system is top-heavy, and the pipeline feeding it is narrowing.

Fewer births, fewer kindergartners

The most direct explanation is demographic. Maryland births have declined steadily, from more than 77,000 per year in 2007-2008 to roughly 65,600 in 2023-24. Those children born in the mid-2000s are now graduating high school. The children born in the leaner years since 2019 are the ones entering kindergarten now.

The math is straightforward but unforgiving. Donald Connelly, MCPS capital budget manager, told WJLA that the birth decline "translates five years later, six years later to kindergarteners." In Montgomery County^↗ specifically, births fell from over 13,000 in 2014 to fewer than 11,000 by 2023. Montgomery's K enrollment has tracked that drop almost exactly: from 11,518 in 2019-20 to 9,877 in 2025-26, a 14.2% decline that brought the district to its all-time low.

Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University's Edunomics Lab, was blunt in an interview with The Baltimore Banner:

"Birthrates are cratering across the nation, and the decline will seriously remake education."

Birth rates are a national phenomenon, but Maryland's version carries a local twist. Between 2019 and 2024, Montgomery County added 15,925 housing units, yet MCPS enrollment fell by 6,085 students. New housing is not generating new students.

The immigration factor

Birth rates are not the only force at work. Federal immigration enforcement has introduced a second, more sudden pressure on kindergarten enrollment, particularly in districts with large immigrant communities.

At the start of the 2025-26 school year, MCPS welcomed just 111 newcomer students, defined as children who are brand-new to the country or returning after years abroad. By the same point in 2023-24, the district had welcomed more than 400. Statewide, Maryland schools served 4,033 fewer English language learner students than the prior year.

Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich attributed part of the decline to "Trump's actions around deportation, where people have either already been deported or are worried about being deported." Disentangling immigration enforcement from the birth-rate trend is difficult with enrollment data alone. Maryland's enrollment files do not include demographic breakdowns, so the relative contribution of each force remains unclear.

What is clear is that both forces push in the same direction, and both are concentrated in the state's largest systems.

Where the losses are concentrated

Montgomery County^↗ and Prince George's County^↗ together account for 2,673 of the 5,883 kindergartners lost statewide since 2019-20, or 45% of the state's K decline. Add Baltimore County^↗, Anne Arundel^↗, and Howard County^↗, and the five largest systems account for 77% of the loss.

Three districts hit their lowest K enrollment on record in 2025-26: Montgomery (9,877), Howard (3,473), and Carroll^↗ (1,648). Montgomery's K class has not been this small at any point in the data going back to 2015-16. Howard has declined four straight years.

The geographic pattern is not uniform. Only four of 24 districts enrolled more kindergartners in 2025-26 than in 2019-20: Frederick^↗ (+2.5%), Talbot (+5.9%), Wicomico (+2.6%), and Caroline (+0.5%). Frederick stands out as the sole large district bucking the trend, with K enrollment of 3,177, up 15.4% over the decade. Frederick's growth aligns with its status as Maryland's fastest-growing county, with population rising 7.5% between 2020 and 2023 alone.

Baltimore City^↗ presents a different trajectory. Its K enrollment was already falling before COVID, dropping from 6,729 in 2015-16 to 5,980 in 2019-20. The pandemic accelerated an existing decline. At 5,517 in 2025-26, the city's K class is 18.0% smaller than it was a decade ago.

The ripple through the grades

Kindergarten is grade zero of a 13-year pipeline. When 58,391 students entered kindergarten during the COVID year of 2020-21, that cohort did not stay small. By the time those students reached fifth grade in 2025-26, the class had grown to 65,076, as students entered the system through transfers and late enrollment. First grade consistently exceeds the prior year's kindergarten by 2% to 5%, a pattern that held every year except 2020-21 itself, when COVID kept students out.

But the growth that occurs after kindergarten does not erase the starting deficit. Today's elementary grades tell the story: K through grade 3 are all smaller in 2025-26 than they were in 2015-16, with losses ranging from 4,462 (grade 3, down 6.5%) to 6,582 (grade 1, down 9.7%). Meanwhile, grades 9 through 12 are all larger, reflecting the bigger cohorts that entered kindergarten a decade ago. Grade 9 enrollment jumped 8.9% to 75,813. Grade 12 rose 10.1% to 64,391.

This inversion will eventually resolve itself. The smaller elementary cohorts will age into middle school, then high school. Maryland's total K-12 enrollment, which dropped more than 1% in 2025-26 alone, will face additional downward pressure as the bulge in upper grades graduates and is replaced by smaller classes from below.

What the funding formula sees

Maryland's Blueprint for Maryland's Future, the state's $3.8 billion education reform law, funds schools on a per-pupil basis. The foundation amount rises each year, from $8,310 per student in 2022-23 toward a target of $12,365 by 2032-33. But per-pupil increases cannot fully compensate for falling headcounts, because many school costs are fixed: buildings still need heat, buses still run routes, and a classroom with 18 students requires the same teacher as a classroom with 22.

The Baltimore Sun reported that "city schools with declining enrollment will struggle to pay teachers a higher salary and could potentially close." MCPS projects a loss of roughly 7,000 additional students over the next six years. If each student carries approximately $10,000 in state and local per-pupil funding, that projection implies $70 million in reduced revenue, even as the district operates 238 school buildings.

Montgomery County Executive Elrich acknowledged that the system "won't have to hire additional teachers to maintain class size" but warned that further declines "can create issues in terms of class sizes if student populations fall too small," forcing a choice between undersized classes and consolidation.

A forecast written in kindergarten rosters

The National Center for Education Statistics projects that Maryland will lose about 8% of its students by 2031. The kindergarten pipeline suggests the math behind that projection is already in motion. Maryland's births have not rebounded. The 2025-26 kindergarten class of 59,204 will become next year's first grade, and whatever kindergarten class enters in 2026-27 will almost certainly be drawn from an even smaller birth cohort.

The data do not show whether private school enrollment or homeschooling is absorbing some of the decline. Maryland superintendents have cited both as contributing factors alongside birth rates, but neither MSDE enrollment data nor the Maryland Department of Planning projections separate these flows at the kindergarten level.

What the data do show, unambiguously, is the trajectory: eight of the last 10 years have produced a smaller kindergarten class than the year before. The two exceptions were a statistical blip in 2019-20 and a post-COVID bounce in 2021-22. Neither reversed the underlying trend. For every district planning its staffing, its facilities, and its budget, the kindergarten roster is the clearest leading indicator available. In 20 of 24 Maryland districts, that indicator is pointing down.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

One District Growing: Maryland's 12-District Reversal

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT

This is part of The MDEdTribune's series on Maryland's 2025-26 enrollment data.

A year ago, half of Maryland's 24 school districts were adding students. This year, one is.

Twelve districts that grew in 2024-25 reversed direction in 2025-26, flipping from collective gains to collective losses. The state shed 9,385 students, a 1.1% decline that pushed total enrollment to 849,698. That is the steepest single-year drop since the pandemic year of 2020-21 and leaves Maryland just 1,532 students above where it started a decade ago.

Kent County^↗, with 1,609 students, is the only district in the state that added enrollment this year. It gained 18 students after losing 30 the year before.

The reversal, district by district

The scale of the flip is unusual. In 2024-25, the state was evenly split: 12 districts growing, 12 declining. By 2025-26, the split was 1-to-23.

Prince George's County^↗ swung the hardest: from gaining 786 students to losing 1,324, a net reversal of 2,110 seats. Baltimore City^↗ went from adding 1,101 students, its largest single-year gain in the dataset, to losing 329. Frederick County^↗, which had posted gains in eight of the last ten years, lost 123 students after gaining 338 the year before.

Several suburban and exurban districts that had been buoyed by post-pandemic rebounds also reversed. Anne Arundel^↗ went from +511 to -316. Charles County^↗ went from +274 to -296. Wicomico^↗, on the Eastern Shore, swung from +501 to -176.

Even the smallest districts were not spared. Carroll County^↗ had the sharpest reversal by rate: a system that was essentially flat (+17) a year ago lost 442 students, a 1.7% decline. Caroline^↗, Somerset^↗, Worcester^↗, and Queen Anne's^↗ all posted modest gains in 2024-25 and modest losses in 2025-26.

The worst since COVID

The statewide loss is the second-largest one-year decline in the dataset, exceeded only by the 18,291-student pandemic-year plunge in 2020-21. It erases four years of uneven recovery. After bottoming out at 853,307 in 2021-22, enrollment climbed back to 859,083 by 2024-25. The 2025-26 figure of 849,698 is now 3,609 students below that post-COVID low.

The decade-long trajectory shows how fragile the recovery was. Maryland reached 876,810 students in 2019-20, a pre-pandemic high. It has now lost 27,112 students from that peak, a 3.1% decline. The current enrollment of 849,698 sits just 1,532 above the 2015-16 level of 848,166.

Where the losses concentrated

Three districts account for more than half the statewide loss. Montgomery County^↗, already declining, nearly tripled its losses: from -997 to nearly triple that figure, a 1.8% drop that left it at 151,983 students. Baltimore County^↗ went from -583 to -1,913, also 1.8%. Prince George's, as noted, swung from growth to a 1,324-student loss.

Montgomery's trajectory is particularly consequential. The state's largest school system projects losing nearly 7,000 additional students by 2032, a forecast driven by declining births in the county. MCPS Capital Budget Manager Donald Connelly told the school board that births in Montgomery County fell from more than 13,000 in 2014 to less than 11,000 in 2023.

Eleven districts hit all-time lows in the dataset (which begins in 2015-16): Allegany, Baltimore County, Calvert, Caroline, Cecil, Dorchester, Garrett, Harford, Montgomery, St. Mary's, and Talbot.

A convergence of pressures

The mass reversal does not appear to have a single cause. Multiple forces converged on 2025-26, and the data available, which covers only total enrollment and grade-level counts, cannot isolate their individual contributions.

The most widely cited factor is a structural one: declining birth rates. Maryland recorded roughly 70,000 births in 2019-20, compared with more than 77,000 in 2007-08. Those smaller cohorts are now entering elementary school while the larger ones graduate. The arithmetic is straightforward, but it has been true for years. What changed in 2025-26 was the layering of additional pressures on top of that baseline.

Immigration enforcement is one such pressure. Montgomery County Superintendent Thomas Taylor cited drops in international student enrollment, along with "skyrocketing housing costs" pushing families with young children out of the county. In October 2025, MCPS welcomed just over 100 newcomer students, fewer than half the 400-plus during the same period a year earlier. State Board of Education President Josh Michael told The Baltimore Banner: "Never has there been an administration in the era of mass public schooling where we have treated immigrants this way."

"Never has there been an administration in the era of mass public schooling where we have treated immigrants this way." — Josh Michael, President, Maryland State Board of Education, The Baltimore Banner

That dynamic is most visible in Prince George's and Montgomery counties, which together are home to more than half of Maryland's foreign-born population. The two districts combined lost 4,132 students this year. But immigration enforcement cannot explain the reversal in Carroll County, Washington County, or the Eastern Shore districts, where immigrant populations are much smaller.

Federal employment losses add another layer. Maryland is losing federal jobs faster than any other state as the administration cuts positions, potentially forcing families to relocate. Homeschooling has also surged: Maryland now has roughly 42,000 homeschooled children, up 51% from 28,000 in 2020.

The enrollment data cannot distinguish between families who left the state, switched to private or homeschool, or simply never enrolled a kindergartner. It captures the outcome but not the mechanism.

From split to nearly unanimous

The direction chart tells the clearest version of the story. Pre-pandemic, Maryland routinely had 14 to 17 districts growing each year. Even in the recovery years of 2022 and 2023, seven and 16 districts, respectively, posted gains. The 2025-26 result, with a single district in positive territory, matches the near-unanimity of the pandemic year itself, when only two districts grew.

The difference is that COVID was an acute shock with a visible cause. The 2025-26 reversal is not a single event but a slow-moving convergence: fewer births, fewer newcomers, fewer federal paychecks, more families choosing alternatives to public school. Each force is individually modest. Together, they produced the most geographically uniform decline in a decade.

The funding question

Under the Blueprint for Maryland's Future, school funding flows through a per-pupil formula that uses the greater of prior-year enrollment or a three-year moving average. That buffer was designed for temporary dips, not a statewide reversal. If 2026-27 enrollment continues to decline, the moving average will catch up, and districts will face funding reductions proportional to their losses.

Montgomery County's accelerating losses, on top of prior-year losses, will compress that buffer quickly. For Prince George's, which had been growing, the sudden reversal means 2025-26 funding was calibrated for a district that no longer exists at that size.

The question facing Maryland's school systems is not whether to plan for smaller enrollment. The question is whether the 2025-26 reversal was a one-year convergence of unusual pressures, or the beginning of a structural shift in which growth districts no longer exist. The answer depends on factors, from federal immigration policy to interest rates to birth registrations, that no superintendent controls.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Only 4 of 24 Maryland Districts Have Recovered from COVID

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 12:00:00 GMT

This is part of The MDEdTribune's series on Maryland's 2025-26 enrollment data.

Five years after COVID emptied Maryland classrooms, the state expected students to come back. They did not. Of the state's 24 school systems, only four have returned to their 2019-20 enrollment levels: Frederick^↗, Carroll^↗, Wicomico^↗, and Charles^↗. Together, those four districts enroll roughly 13% of the state's public school students. The other 87% attend school systems that remain below where they stood before the pandemic.

The deficit is not closing. It is growing. In 2025-26, Maryland posted its largest single-year enrollment drop since the COVID crash. The state's 849,698 students represent its lowest total since 2016, erasing a decade of growth in five years.

The plateau that wasn't

Maryland's enrollment trajectory since 2020 tells a story of false hope. The state lost 18,291 students in the pandemic's first year, then partially recovered. A 5,543-student rebound in 2022-23 suggested the bottom had been found. State officials at the Maryland Department of Planning projected modest growth, anticipating an increase of roughly 2,500 students in 2025-26.

Instead, enrollment fell by 9,385, a swing of nearly 12,000 students from projections. Geoff Sanderson, the state's schools accountability chief, told The Baltimore Banner that the scale of the decline caught the state off guard:

"Admittedly, this fall was a bit of a surprise to us."

The surprise was not that enrollment fell. It was that the decline accelerated after three years of apparent stability. From 2023 to 2025, state enrollment held nearly flat, fluctuating within a range of 800 students. Then the floor dropped.

Where the students aren't

The five largest deficits account for 76.1% of the total gap between Maryland's 2020 peak and its current enrollment. Montgomery^↗ leads the state, sitting 8,604 students below its pre-pandemic level, a 5.4% decline that has accelerated each year since 2023. Baltimore County^↗ is 7,043 below, a 6.3% drop. Prince George's^↗ is 4,673 below. Baltimore City^↗ is 2,127 below. Howard^↗ is 1,892 below.

These are not small, rural districts losing a handful of students. They are the state's population centers, its economic engines, the jurisdictions that receive the largest share of Blueprint for Maryland's Future funding. Montgomery County alone enrolls more students than the 16 smallest districts combined.

Among the smaller systems, the percentage losses are even steeper. Garrett^↗ County, one of the state's smallest districts with 3,142 students, has lost 13.4% of its enrollment since 2020. Calvert^↗ is down 7.8%. Kent^↗ County, which registered the only enrollment gain in 2025-26, still sits 10.7% below its 2020 level.

2026: every district lost students except one

The 2025-26 school year produced something Maryland has not seen in at least a decade: 23 of 24 districts lost students simultaneously. Only Kent County bucked the trend. The three largest suburban systems — Montgomery, Baltimore County, and Prince George's — accounted for nearly two-thirds of the total decline.

The breadth of the decline is what distinguishes 2026 from earlier years. In 2022-23, when the state rebounded by 5,543, the gains were concentrated in a handful of growing suburbs. In 2025-26, the losses reached everywhere, from Frederick (down 123 after years of growth) to Carroll (down 442, losing its recovery status from the prior year) to the Eastern Shore.

Worcester County, which had clawed back above its 2020 level by 2025, fell below again. The recovery count dropped from five districts to four.

Why recovery keeps receding

Three overlapping forces are suppressing enrollment, and none is temporary.

The most direct is a birth rate decline that began in 2016 and deepened during the pandemic. Maryland recorded roughly 70,000 births in 2019 and 2020, compared to more than 77,000 in 2007 and 2008, according to The Baltimore Banner. Those smaller cohorts are now arriving in kindergarten. Statewide, K enrollment is down 5,883 students from 2020, a 9.0% decline, the steepest loss of any grade.

The grade-level pattern is stark: every grade from K through 8 shrank since 2020, while grades 10 through 12 grew as larger pre-pandemic cohorts aged through high school. Grade 12 is up 5.3%. Grade 1 is down 7.7%. When those larger high school classes graduate, they will be replaced by the smaller elementary cohorts working their way up, compounding the decline for years.

Homeschooling accounts for a second channel of loss. Maryland's homeschool population has grown 51% since the pandemic, from 27,754 students in 2020 to more than 42,000. That 14,000-student increase would fill roughly half of the statewide enrollment gap on its own. Private school enrollment, by contrast, has held steady at 12% to 13% of the K-12 population since 2017, suggesting the exits are going to kitchen tables, not competing campuses.

Immigration enforcement has introduced a third, more recent pressure, concentrated in Montgomery County. The district's newcomer enrollment, defined as students brand-new to the country or returning after years abroad, dropped from more than 400 by October 2023 to just 111 by the same point in 2024. Superintendent Thomas Taylor said international enrollments were "sharply down." County Executive Marc Elrich attributed part of the decline to federal deportation actions. Montgomery County school board members attributed part of the decline to federal immigration enforcement, telling The Baltimore Banner that some students had simply vanished from enrollment rolls.

No single factor explains why Montgomery, the state's largest system, has lost 8,604 students in five years. Birth rates, homeschooling, and immigration enforcement all contribute. The data cannot apportion the decline among them, and the state does not track enrollment exits by destination.

Frederick's exception proves nothing

Frederick^↗ County is the only large district to recover, and it is not close. At 46,345 students, it sits 3,916 above its 2020 level, a 9.2% gain that makes it the fastest-growing school system in Maryland. The district is building a new 882-seat elementary school to handle overcrowding. One campus, Oakdale Elementary, is operating at 170% of capacity.

Frederick's growth is real, but it is driven by suburban housing development along the I-270 corridor, a pipeline that does not exist in most of the state. The three other recovered districts, Carroll (+243), Wicomico (+180), and Charles (+127), are barely above their 2020 marks. A single bad year could push any of them back below, as it did to Worcester this year.

The recovery tracker tells the story in miniature. In 2022, only one district was at or above 2020 levels. That number crept to three, then five. In 2026, it fell back to four. The trend line for recovery is not rising. It is oscillating at the bottom of the chart.

Funding in a shrinking system

Enrollment decline collides with one of the largest education spending increases in state history. The Blueprint for Maryland's Future allocates funding on a per-pupil basis, with a foundation amount that rises from $8,310 in 2022-23 toward $12,365 by 2032-33. When enrollment falls, the total dollars flowing to a district fall with it, even as the per-pupil amount increases.

The timing compounds the pressure. The federal government notified Maryland in early 2026 that $360 million in COVID-era relief funds would not be reimbursed. State Superintendent Carey Wright called the decision "catastrophic," noting the funds had already been spent. The districts hit hardest, Prince George's, Montgomery, and Baltimore City, are the same ones with the deepest enrollment deficits.

Montgomery County is now discussing the possibility of school closures for the first time in 40 years. The district projects enrollment will continue falling to 149,706 by 2031, a loss of 15,561 from the 2019 peak. It maintains 238 school buildings.

What the pipeline signals

Maryland's enrollment problem is not a COVID aftershock that will fade. The grade-level data makes that clear. Kindergarten, the entry point for the system, lost 9.0% of its students since 2020. First grade lost 7.7%. These are not students who left during the pandemic. They are students who were never born or never enrolled.

The 18 of 24 districts whose gap from 2020 widened between 2024 and 2026 are not slowly recovering. They are falling further behind. Even Frederick, the state's growth engine, lost 123 students in 2025-26 after years of unbroken gains.

The question Maryland faces is not when enrollment will recover. The grade-level pipeline answers that: it will not, absent a reversal in birth rates or migration patterns that does not appear in any current projection. The question is what a school system built for 876,000 students does when it has 849,000 and shrinking.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Maryland's 66,000-Student Ghost Class

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 12:00:00 GMT

This is part of The MDEdTribune's series on Maryland's 2025-26 enrollment data.

If Maryland's pre-COVID enrollment growth had continued, the state would have 915,942 students this fall. It has 849,698. The difference — 66,244 students, or 7.2% of what should have been — is a ghost class larger than every school district in the state except Montgomery County.

That gap widened by 16,171 students in 2025-26 alone, the biggest single-year increase since the pandemic opened it. Budgets, staffing plans, and the Blueprint for Maryland's Future were all built around a student body that no longer exists.

Where Maryland was supposed to be

Before COVID, Maryland's public schools were growing at a pace of roughly 6,800 students per year. From 2016 to 2020, enrollment climbed from 848,166 to a peak of 876,810. If that trajectory had continued, the state would have enrolled approximately 915,942 students this fall.

Instead, it enrolled 849,698. The gap between projection and reality: 66,244 students, or 7.2% of what should have been.

This is not a pandemic story. The pandemic opened the gap. What happened since has been worse. In 2022-23, the gap was 36,732 students. By 2023-24, it was 44,007. Last year, 50,073. This year, the gap widened by 16,171 students, the largest single-year increase since 2021.

The four-year plateau from 2022 to 2025 masked what was really happening. Enrollment appeared stable in absolute terms. But every year of flatness, while the projection line kept climbing at 6,787 students per year, added another 7,000 phantom students to the shortfall. The plateau was not recovery. It was the gap compounding in the background.

The year the floor dropped

The 2025-26 decline stands out not just for its size but for its breadth. Of Maryland's 24 county-based school systems, 23 lost students. Kent^↗, the smallest district in the state with 1,609 students, was the sole exception, gaining 18.

Three districts drove nearly two-thirds of the statewide loss. Montgomery County^↗ lost the most, 1.8% of its enrollment and nearly a third of the state's total decline. Baltimore County^↗ lost 1,913 (20.4% of the total). Prince George's County^↗ lost 1,324 (14.1%).

The pattern extended into mid-sized and small districts alike. Carroll County lost 442 students (1.7%), Howard County^↗ lost 417 (0.7%), and Harford lost 415 (1.1%). Even Dorchester County, with only 4,169 students remaining, lost 91, a 2.1% decline that was the steepest percentage drop in the state.

Where the gap lives

Zoom in with district-level projections and the ghost class is not evenly distributed. If pre-COVID trends had continued, Montgomery County would have 172,915 students. It has 151,983, a gap of 20,932 or 12.1%. Prince George's County is 14,827 below projection (10.5%). Baltimore County is 12,490 short (10.7%).

These are the state's three largest systems, and they were all growing before the pandemic. Montgomery was adding roughly 2,050 students per year. Prince George's was adding 1,769. Baltimore County was adding 912. All three have been losing students since 2020, and the losses accelerated in 2025-26.

The exceptions are telling. Frederick County^↗, which was growing at 726 students per year pre-pandemic, is only 329 students below its projection, 0.7%. It is the only large system to nearly hold its pre-COVID trajectory. Baltimore City^↗, which was losing roughly 1,127 students per year before the pandemic, is actually 5,127 students above its projected 2026 level. The pandemic did not cause Baltimore City's decline. It merely continued a pattern that had already been priced in.

A system splitting in two

The statewide numbers conceal a structural divergence that will define Maryland education for the next decade. Elementary and high school enrollment are moving in opposite directions.

Since 2020, K-5 enrollment has fallen by 23,343 students, a 5.8% decline. Kindergarten alone has dropped from 65,087 to 59,204, down 9.0%. Meanwhile, grades 9-12 have grown by 7,754 students (2.9%), as the larger pre-pandemic cohorts move through high school. Grades 10, 11, and 12 each gained students since 2020, even as every elementary grade lost thousands.

This is a pipeline problem. The smaller kindergarten cohorts entering today will produce smaller middle school classes in five years and smaller high school classes in nine. Montgomery County's birth data illustrates the mechanism directly: the county recorded more than 13,000 births in 2014. By 2023, that number had fallen below 11,000. Those children are just now entering kindergarten.

The high school enrollment bump is temporary. When the smaller K-5 cohorts reach grade nine, high schools will begin to decline too. Montgomery County Public Schools projects losing an additional 7,000 students by 2032.

What is driving the gap

No single factor explains 66,244 missing students. The most direct contributor is declining births. Maryland's birth rate began falling in 2016, and the children not born in 2016-2020 are the students not enrolling in kindergarten today. The data is structural and largely irreversible on a five-year horizon.

Homeschooling accounts for a measurable share. Maryland had 27,754 homeschooled students in 2020. That number is now approximately 42,000, an increase of roughly 14,000 students, or about 21% of the ghost class. Not all of those students would have been in public schools absent the pandemic, but the majority were enrolled in public schools before switching.

"The missing children in the public school system are in the homeschooling environment and they have not come back." -- Alfred Sundara, Assistant Secretary, Maryland Department of Planning

A third mechanism emerged in 2025-26: immigration enforcement. Montgomery County welcomed 111 newcomer students as of October 2025, compared to more than 400 in the same period the prior year. Whether families left the state, pulled children from school, or simply did not enroll is not known. Montgomery County school board members told The Baltimore Banner that immigration enforcement had driven families out of the enrollment rolls, though the district could not track where they went.

Housing costs compound the problem in the state's most expensive counties. Montgomery, Howard, and Prince George's counties all border Washington, D.C. The loss of an estimated 15,000 federal jobs in Maryland, reported by The Baltimore Banner, could accelerate outmigration from the D.C. suburbs that anchor the state's enrollment base.

The fiscal arithmetic

The gap between expected and actual enrollment is not abstract. The Blueprint for Maryland's Future allocates state funding based on per-pupil formulas. The Maryland Department of Planning's own projections showed schools running 32,300 students below Blueprint estimates as of fall 2025. The actual shortfall, measured against the pre-COVID trajectory, is twice that.

At the state's base per-pupil foundation amount of roughly $10,000 (scheduled to reach $12,365 by 2033 under the Blueprint), 66,244 missing students represent hundreds of millions of dollars in enrollment-driven funding that will not flow. The state does not simply lose this money; the formula was designed to fund schools that would be teaching these students. Districts are left with the fixed costs of buildings and contracts sized for a population that no longer shows up.

Montgomery County Superintendent Thomas Taylor has proposed repurposing a high school under construction as a holding facility rather than opening it on schedule. Districts across the state face decisions about consolidating programs, reducing sections, and managing a teaching workforce that has grown by 10,202 positions since 2021 even as enrollment shrank.

The enrollment data tracks bodies in seats. It does not say where 66,244 students went — some were never born, some are homeschooled, some left the state. Maryland does not publish a comprehensive accounting, and the available numbers on homeschooling and private enrollment do not sum to 66,244. The gap has components that cannot be separated with the data the state collects.

The next five years

If enrollment stays near 850,000 and the pre-COVID trendline keeps climbing, the ghost class will surpass 80,000 by 2028. If it stays flat through 2030, the gap reaches 93,000.

The more immediate question is whether 2025-26 was a one-time correction after four years of artificial stability, or the beginning of a new trajectory. The kindergarten pipeline suggests the latter. With 59,204 kindergartners this year, down from 65,087 in 2020, the elementary system is feeding smaller cohorts into every subsequent grade for the next decade. The high school enrollment bump that has partially offset elementary losses will peak within two to three years and then reverse.

Maryland passed the most ambitious education funding law in the country four years ago. The Blueprint for Maryland's Future was designed for a student body that no longer exists — and the gap is growing by 16,000 students a year.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.