Baltimore County - EdTribune MD - Maryland Education Data

Maryland's High School Safety Net Just Broke

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Maryland 2025-26 Enrollment.

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

High school was supposed to be the good news. While elementary and middle schools hemorrhaged students after the pandemic, the secondary grades kept climbing, absorbing larger cohorts that had entered kindergarten before the state's birth rate fell. That buffer is gone.

Maryland's high school enrollment dropped by 4,096 students in 2025-26, landing at 273,893 and ending nine consecutive years of growth — the longest sustained streak in the dataset. It is the first time since at least 2016 that both K-8 and high school enrollment declined simultaneously. Together, the two levels produced Maryland's steepest non-pandemic enrollment decline.

Nine years of growth, erased in the math

Maryland's high schools added 25,094 students between 2016 and 2025, a 9.9% increase driven by large cohorts born in the late 2000s working their way through the grade pipeline. Even during the pandemic year of 2020-21, when K-8 enrollment cratered by nearly 20,000 students, high school enrollment still rose by 1,644.

That pattern made high schools the system's shock absorber. From 2021 through 2025, K-8 enrollment was essentially flat or falling while high school enrollment climbed by 10,206. The high school share of total K-12 enrollment rose from 29.8% in 2016 to a peak of 32.4% in 2025.

In 2026, both bars turned negative for the first time. K-8 lost 5,289 students. High school lost 4,096. The combined loss of 9,385 is the largest single-year decline outside the pandemic year itself.

The 9th-grade bulge is gone

The mechanics are visible in a single grade. Ninth-grade enrollment peaked at 83,081 in 2021-22, when the large pre-recession birth cohorts of 2007-08 reached high school. Since then, each entering freshman class has been smaller: 82,145 in 2023, 79,658 in 2024, 77,465 in 2025, and 75,813 in 2026.

The decline from peak to present is 7,268 students, an 8.7% drop in four years. The 2026 freshman class is now smaller than the 2020 class that entered during the pandemic. This is not a COVID anomaly. It is the pipeline catching up: the kindergarten class of 2017 (64,472 students) was smaller than the kindergarten class of 2016 (64,930), which was smaller still than the pre-2016 cohorts that fed the 9th-grade surge.

Grades 10 and 11 also declined, by 1,831 (-2.6%) and 1,160 (-1.8%) respectively. Only grade 12 grew, adding 547 students (0.9%), as the last of the large cohorts graduated.

Nobody was spared

Twenty of Maryland's 24 school districts lost high school students in 2025-26. Montgomery County^↗ Public Schools led the losses at 1,133 students (-2.2%), followed by Baltimore County^↗ Public Schools at 999 (-2.9%) and Prince George's County^↗ Public Schools at 622 (-1.5%).

Only four districts gained high school students, all modestly: Howard County^↗ added 77, Worcester 26, Queen Anne's 18, and Kent 1. The breadth of the decline, spanning suburban, urban, and rural systems alike, points to a demographic cause rather than a district-specific one.

Birth rates and the pipeline that could not last

The most direct explanation is straightforward arithmetic. Maryland births peaked above 77,000 per year in the late 2000s and have since declined to roughly 70,000, according to Baltimore Banner reporting. Those larger birth cohorts sustained high school growth for years as they moved through the pipeline. By 2025-26, the pipeline has emptied: the students now entering 9th grade were born around 2011-12, when births were already falling.

Montgomery County Superintendent Thomas Taylor attributed his district's losses in part to "a sustained reduction in resident births in the county, which translates directly to smaller incoming kindergarten classes," according to the Baltimore Banner. That kindergarten effect is now, years later, a high school effect.

A second factor compounds the decline. Federal immigration enforcement has slowed the flow of newcomer students into Maryland schools. Montgomery County enrolled just 111 students new to the country by October 2025, compared to over 400 in the same period a year earlier. While the immigration effect is most visible in elementary schools, it removes students who would eventually have reached high school. The state does not track enrollment by immigration status, making the exact contribution impossible to isolate.

Funding in a system without a floor

The timing collides with Maryland's Blueprint for Maryland's Future, the landmark education reform law that distributes funding on a per-pupil basis. Every lost student reduces the revenue flowing to a district. When only elementary schools were shrinking, high school growth partially offset the fiscal damage. That offset no longer exists.

The state is already bracing for a $1.4 billion budget shortfall. Districts that planned staffing and facility usage around continued high school growth now face a structural mismatch: high schools sized for 278,000 students serving 274,000, with the gap likely to widen.

The share chart tells the story differently. High school's portion of total enrollment rose steadily from 29.8% in 2016 to 32.4% in 2025 as K-8 shrank and HS grew. In 2026, that share ticked down to 32.2%. The reversal is small but it signals the end of the compositional shift that districts used to justify high school investments.

The Maryland Department of Planning had anticipated high school declines beginning in 2026-27. The actual decline arrived a year early, which caught state forecasters off guard.

The question ahead

The kindergarten classes entering Maryland schools today average around 59,000 students, compared to the 65,000-student classes that fed the high school boom. Those smaller cohorts will take nine years to fully work through the system. High school enrollment has not bottomed out. It has only just begun to decline.

The question for Maryland's school systems is whether the remaining large cohorts, currently in middle school, will provide one more year of relative stability before the pipeline narrows further, or whether the immigration slowdown and continued homeschooling growth will accelerate the decline beyond what demographics alone would predict. The COVID-era kindergarten class of 2021, just 58,391 students, will reach 9th grade in 2030. That cohort will set the floor.

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.

Baltimore County's Six-Year Slide Reaches a New Floor

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT

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

Baltimore County^↗ Public Schools lost 1,913 students in 2025-26, more than tripling the previous year's decline and pushing enrollment to 104,031. It is the lowest figure in the district's records.

That single-year drop would be notable on its own. What makes it a structural story is context: it was the sixth consecutive annual decline, a streak matched by only two other Maryland districts, both rural systems with fewer than 5,000 students. Baltimore County, the state's third-largest school system, has shed 7,043 students since its 2020 peak of 111,074, a 6.3% loss that outpaces every other large district in the state.

The losses slowed, then didn't

The trajectory of the decline matters as much as its depth. The initial COVID-era loss in 2020-21 was severe: 2,867 students, a 2.6% drop in a single year. What followed looked like stabilization. Annual losses shrank to 582 in 2021-22 and 308 in 2022-23, suggesting the district might be finding a floor.

It was not. Losses ticked back up to 790 in 2023-24 and 583 in 2024-25 before the 2025-26 plunge of 1,913, the worst single year since the pandemic's first hit. The pattern is not a slow bleed leveling off. It is a decline that paused, then re-accelerated.

Where the students aren't

The grade-level data reveals a district being hollowed out from the bottom. Elementary enrollment (K-5) fell 9.0% from 2020 to 2026, a loss of 4,685 students. Middle grades (6-8) dropped 10.3%, losing 2,663. High school enrollment, buoyed by larger cohorts working their way through, peaked at 34,656 in 2023 but has since turned downward, losing 1,345 students in the past three years.

Kindergarten tells the pipeline story. Baltimore County enrolled 8,420 kindergartners in 2016. In 2025-26, it enrolled 7,513, a 10.8% decline over a decade. Those smaller entering cohorts propagate upward each year, guaranteeing continued losses in the elementary grades for years to come.

The 2025-26 grade-level data carries an unusual signature. Grade 10 lost 771 students, the single largest grade-level loss by far, accounting for 40% of the total decline. Grade 12 lost 329 and grade 2 lost 267. The grade 10 drop is large enough to suggest something beyond normal cohort flow, though without school-level data, the specific cause is not identifiable.

Shrinking faster than the state

Baltimore County's 6.3% loss since 2020 stands out even in a state where most districts are declining. Maryland as a whole fell from 876,810 to 849,698 over the same period, a 3.1% decline. In 2025-26 alone, every district in the state except Kent County lost students.

Among the state's nine largest districts, Baltimore County's percentage decline is the worst. Montgomery County lost more students in absolute terms (8,604), but from a much larger base, putting its rate at 5.4%. Frederick County, Baltimore County's neighbor to the west, grew 9.2% over the same period, adding 3,916 students.

That divergence captures a regional dynamic. Baltimore County's share of Maryland's total enrollment slid from 12.70% in 2019 to 12.24% in 2026. The district is not just losing students. It is losing its proportional weight in the state's education system.

Outmigration and the exurban pull

The most likely driver is domestic outmigration, families relocating from Baltimore County to lower-cost exurban counties. Census estimates show Baltimore County lost population in 2022 and 2023, while Carroll County and Frederick County gained residents. Maryland's statewide domestic migration has been negative since 2020, with the Maryland Chamber of Commerce attributing the outflow to high taxes, rising housing costs, and regulatory complexity.

Falling birth rates are a contributing factor statewide. Maryland births declined from 74,316 in 2000 to 65,594 in 2023, an 11.7% drop, and the kindergarten data in Baltimore County reflects this pipeline compression. But birth rates alone cannot explain why Baltimore County declined 6.3% while its neighbor Frederick grew 9.2%. Something is redistributing families across the region, and housing affordability is the most plausible mechanism, even if the enrollment data cannot prove it directly.

The mdschooldata package does not include demographic breakdowns, so it is not possible to determine whether the losses are concentrated among particular racial or socioeconomic groups. That is a significant gap in understanding the nature of the decline.

$169 million in cuts and counting

The fiscal consequences have arrived. The Baltimore Banner reported in December 2025 that Superintendent Myriam Rogers has cut $169 million from the budget over two years, eliminating more than 400 positions, ending academic programs, and freezing central office hiring. Enrollment projections have been off by more than 2,700 students, compounding the budget uncertainty.

"Eliminating positions, potential salary reductions from prior negotiations, and supply and materials cuts are all on the table." -- Conduit Street (Maryland Association of Counties), May 2025

The Blueprint for Maryland's Future, the state's $3.8 billion education reform law, adds a paradoxical layer. Baltimore County's Blueprint costs reached $1 billion in fiscal year 2026, three years ahead of projections, even as the student population triggering that spending continues to shrink. The $1 billion figure exceeded updated state estimates by $123 million. Per-pupil costs are rising precisely because the denominator keeps falling.

Meanwhile, staffing has grown statewide even as enrollment drops. Maryland public schools added 10,202 employees from 2021 to 2026 while losing 2,307 students. Non-instructional staff rose 25%, compared to 7% for teachers. Whether that reflects necessary investment in student support or institutional inertia is a matter of perspective, but the cost trajectory and the enrollment trajectory are moving in opposite directions.

Unanswered

Several questions remain outside the reach of enrollment counts. The grade 10 loss of 771 students in a single year could reflect families leaving for private school, transfers to career and technical programs in other counties, or simple cohort variation. Without school-level data or exit surveys, the mechanism is opaque.

The role of school quality perceptions is similarly unmeasurable from enrollment data alone. Baltimore County's four-year graduation rate has hovered near the state average, but parental decisions about where to enroll are shaped by factors that aggregate statistics do not capture: individual school reputations, program offerings, perceived safety, commute times. The data shows that families are leaving. It does not say why any particular family left.

The question for 2027

The 2025-26 acceleration breaks a pattern that had looked like it might stabilize. If the 2026 loss was an anomaly, driven by a one-time factor like a large cohort graduating or a reporting adjustment, the district could return to the 500-600 annual losses of the preceding years. If it was the beginning of a new phase, with the pandemic's delayed effects compounding birth rate declines and outmigration, losses in the 1,000-2,000 range could become the norm.

Superintendent Rogers told Fox Baltimore in September 2024 that pre-kindergarten expansion would feed future enrollment growth, citing 2,000 full-time and 2,400 half-day pre-K seats. Whether pre-K students translating into kindergarten enrollment can offset the losses at every other grade level is the test. The kindergarten data so far is not encouraging: 7,513 kindergartners in 2025-26, essentially flat from the year before, and 10.8% below a decade ago.

For a district that has now lost the equivalent of roughly 280 classrooms of students since 2020, the question is no longer whether the decline will stop. It is whether the system can restructure around the enrollment it actually has.

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

Frederick's Growth Streak Breaks After Four Years

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 12:00:00 GMT

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

Frederick^↗ County Public Schools lost 123 students in 2025-26. By itself, a 0.3% dip barely registers. But Frederick had been Maryland's lone large-district growth story — 4,310 students added between 2022 and 2025, faster than any other system in the state. The streak is over, and with it, Maryland's last engine of enrollment growth has stalled.

The loss leaves Kent County, a rural Eastern Shore system with 1,609 students, as the only one of Maryland's 24 districts that added enrollment this year. It gained 18.

The four-year run and what fueled it

Frederick's growth streak began in 2022, when the district rebounded from a small pandemic-era dip of 271 students with a surge of 1,777 in a single year. That was the largest one-year gain in Frederick's recent history, and it pulled the district well past its pre-pandemic enrollment. The pace slowed each year after: 1,425 in 2023, 770 in 2024, 338 in 2025. The deceleration was steady enough that the 2026 reversal looks less like a sudden shock than the end of a fading tailwind.

Over the full decade from 2016 to 2026, Frederick added 6,875 students, a 17.4% gain. No other Maryland district comes close. The next-best performer, Anne Arundel^↗, gained 3,820 (4.9%). Frederick's share of statewide enrollment climbed from 4.65% to 5.45% during a period when the state total barely moved.

That growth was driven in part by the I-270 corridor, the interstate that connects Frederick to Montgomery County and the Washington, D.C., suburbs. As housing costs in Montgomery^↗ County rose, families with school-age children moved north along the corridor, trading longer commutes for affordable homes and highly rated schools. Frederick County has been building schools to keep up: some elementary schools have reached 170% capacity, and the district is opening an 882-seat elementary school in August 2026 alongside a new facility, Linganore Creek Elementary, with capacity for nearly 900 students.

The corridor divergence

The I-270 story is most visible when Frederick and Montgomery are placed side by side. In 2016, Montgomery County enrolled 152,038 students, nearly four times Frederick's 39,470. A decade later, Montgomery sits at 151,983, essentially unchanged, while Frederick has grown to 46,345.

But the indexed comparison masks a sharper recent turn. Montgomery lost 2,808 students in 2025-26 alone, a 1.8% decline. WTOP reported that Montgomery County Public Schools Superintendent Thomas Taylor described the enrollment situation as a "sharp decrease," with the system projecting a loss of 6,000 students by 2031. Montgomery's decline accelerated this year in part because international student enrollment fell sharply, a pattern multiple Maryland superintendents attributed to federal immigration enforcement.

Frederick had been the beneficiary of Montgomery's decline. Whether Frederick's own reversal reflects a saturation of the spillover pipeline, a broader demographic shift, or something specific to 2025-26 conditions is not yet clear from the data alone.

A statewide shutout

Frederick's loss is easier to understand in the context of what happened across Maryland. The state posted its largest non-pandemic enrollment drop in 2025-26, a 1.1% decline. Only one of 24 districts gained students, the worst ratio in at least a decade. In the pre-pandemic years of 2017-2020, between 14 and 17 districts were gaining students annually. Even in 2025, half of Maryland's districts were still growing.

The three largest losses came from the state's three largest suburban systems: Montgomery, Baltimore County^↗, and Prince George's^↗. Together, those three account for nearly two-thirds of the statewide loss. Frederick's 123-student decline looks modest by comparison, but it closed the last gap in a wall of red.

The Baltimore Banner reported that the statewide decline nearly doubled initial projections. Superintendents pointed to declining birth rates, federal immigration enforcement, and a 51% increase in homeschooled students since the pandemic as contributing factors.

"It is dropping like a rock because people aren't having kids at the same rate." — Marguerite Roza, Edunomics Lab, Georgetown University, via The Baltimore Banner

The kindergarten signal

Frederick's kindergarten enrollment offers a more specific warning. In 2022, 3,257 kindergarteners enrolled, the highest count in the dataset. By 2026, that number has fallen to 3,177, still well above the pre-pandemic level of 2,754 in 2016 but trending down from the post-COVID surge.

The kindergarten pipeline is the leading indicator for total enrollment five to six years out. If fewer five-year-olds are entering Frederick schools, the growth that defined the district over the past decade cannot sustain itself through migration alone. Maryland's birth rate has been declining since 2016, and the children born during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, when births dipped further, are now entering kindergarten statewide.

Frederick is not immune to this demographic undertow. The district's kindergarten class remains 15.4% larger than it was in 2016, but the year-over-year trajectory since 2022 has been flat to declining.

One year or a turning point?

The 123-student loss is small enough that it could reflect a one-year blip rather than a structural turn. Frederick's total enrollment in 2026 (46,345) is still 9.2% above its 2020 level, a cushion that only three other Maryland districts can claim: Wicomico (+1.2%), Carroll (+1.0%), and Charles (+0.5%). Frederick remains, by far, the state's best-performing district over the past decade.

What the enrollment data alone cannot answer is whether the I-270 migration pipeline has genuinely slowed, or whether 2026 caught an unusually weak year. Frederick County is still building schools and fast-tracking construction with $175 million in capital investment, a signal that local planners still expect growth. State enrollment projections from the Maryland Department of Planning forecast Frederick adding 6,260 students by 2033, the largest projected gain of any district.

If those projections hold, 2026 will be a pause, not a peak. If they don't, the state of Maryland will have lost its last district-level growth story, and the fiscal math of the Blueprint for Maryland's Future, which funds schools based on enrollment counts, will look different for every district in the state.

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

Eleven Districts Hit Record Lows in a Single Year

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 12:00:00 GMT

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

Montgomery County^↗ enrolled 151,983 students this fall. It is the largest school system in Maryland, the employer of thousands of teachers and support staff, the institution around which suburban families organize their lives. It has never, in at least a decade of records, enrolled so few.

It is not alone. Eleven of Maryland's 24 school systems recorded their lowest enrollment on record in 2025-26. The list runs from the state's biggest district to its smallest, the Baltimore suburbs to the Eastern Shore, the I-95 corridor to the Appalachian foothills.

A decade of growth, erased

Maryland's public schools peaked at 876,810 students in 2020. The state had been growing steadily, adding nearly 29,000 students between 2016 and that pre-COVID high. The pandemic reversed the trend, dropping enrollment by 18,291 in a single year. But schools partially recovered. By 2025, enrollment had climbed back to 859,083, and the trajectory looked stable.

Then came 2025-26. The state lost 9,385 students, a 1.1% decline that wiped out three years of post-pandemic recovery and dropped total enrollment to 849,698. That figure sits barely 1,500 above where Maryland started in 2016. A decade of growth, functionally erased.

The loss is the steepest non-COVID drop in the available data, nearly double the 5,212-student decline in 2022 and an order of magnitude larger than the modest losses of 2024 (-488) and the slight gain of 2025 (+721). Twenty-three of 24 districts shrank. Only Kent County^↗, the state's smallest district, grew.

The eleven

The 11 districts at all-time lows collectively enroll 360,793 students, 42.5% of the state total. Their losses account for 62.5% of the total decline among shrinking districts. The list spans every size category and every corner of the state:

I-95 corridor: Montgomery (now 5.4% below its 2020 peak), Baltimore County^↗ (-1,913, 6.3% below peak), Harford^↗ (-415, 3.3% below peak)

Southern Maryland: St. Mary's^↗ (-314, 6.3% below its 2018 peak), Calvert^↗ (-166, 7.8% below its 2016 peak)

Eastern Shore: Cecil^↗ (-222, 8.3% below its 2016 peak), Caroline^↗ (-95, 5.0% below its 2019 peak), Dorchester^↗ (-91, 8.6% below its 2017 peak), Talbot^↗ (-30, 7.1% below its 2020 peak)

Western Maryland: Allegany^↗ (-32, 8.5% below its 2016 peak), Garrett^↗ (-51, 14.7% below its 2016 peak)

The range tells a story. Montgomery lost the most in absolute terms. Garrett lost 51. But in percentage terms, Garrett's situation is far more severe: at 3,142 students, it has shed nearly one in seven students since 2016. It has declined in seven consecutive years. Baltimore County has declined in six straight. Talbot has declined in six.

A COVID-level concentration

The last time this many districts sat at record lows simultaneously was 2021, the COVID year, when 13 hit bottom. Before that, the count had been falling steadily from 2016 onward as most districts grew. In 2019, just five districts were at their lowest point. In 2020, six.

The 2026 figure of 11 is significant because it arrived without a pandemic. In 2021, the cause was obvious: schools closed, families left, the count collapsed. In 2026, schools are open, the economy is functioning, and enrollment fell anyway. The 2021 spike was a shock. The 2026 spike looks structural.

Zero districts set a record high in 2026. In 2025, five did. In 2020, 11 did. The asymmetry is total.

Three forces converging

The most likely driver of the statewide drop is a birth rate decline that is now working its way through the kindergarten pipeline. Maryland births fell from roughly 77,000 per year in 2007-2008 to about 70,000 by 2019-2020, according to Baltimore Banner reporting. In Montgomery County specifically, births dropped from over 13,000 in 2014 to under 11,000 by 2023, according to WJLA. Those smaller cohorts are now entering elementary school while larger cohorts graduate out.

A second factor: homeschooling. Maryland's homeschool enrollment jumped from roughly 28,000 before the pandemic to over 42,000 today, a 51% increase that has not reversed. Alfred Sundara, the state's Assistant Secretary for Data and Analysis, put it directly:

"The missing children in the public school system are in the homeschooling environment and they have not come back." -- Conduit Street / MACo, Sept. 2025

A third, more recent factor is immigration enforcement. Montgomery County, which lost the most students of any district in raw terms, saw its newcomer enrollment drop sharply. Between July and December, the district enrolled roughly 1,540 newcomer students, about half the number from the same period in 2023. School board members in Montgomery County have attributed the decline partly to immigration enforcement, saying some students simply disappeared from the rolls without explanation.

These three forces explain different pieces of the picture. Birth rate decline is structural and affects every district. Homeschooling is a post-pandemic shift that appears sticky. Immigration enforcement is more concentrated in districts with large immigrant populations, particularly Montgomery County. No single cause accounts for a statewide loss of this magnitude.

Where it hits hardest

The percentage declines reveal a different hierarchy than the raw numbers. Dorchester lost 91 students, but that 2.1% drop is the steepest rate among the 11 record-low districts. St. Mary's fell 1.9%. Montgomery, Baltimore County, and Caroline all declined by 1.8%.

For the rural and small-county districts, the arithmetic is punishing. Garrett County's 3,142 students must sustain the same basic infrastructure that any school system requires: a central office, transportation, special education services, athletic programs. Cecil, at 13,843 students and 8.3% below its 2016 peak, faces the same fixed-cost squeeze. These districts cannot close a wing of a building or merge two schools the way a large suburban system can redistribute students across campuses.

For the large suburban districts, the scale of the losses translates directly into budget pressure. Montgomery's steep single-year decline, combined with Maryland's enrollment-based funding formulas, reduces the resources available to a system that is simultaneously managing rising costs. MCPS Capital Budget Manager Donald Connelly has projected a loss of over 6,000 additional students in the next six years based on birth trends.

The Blueprint gap

Maryland's enrollment decline has a specific policy consequence. The Blueprint for Maryland's Future, the state's landmark $3.8 billion education reform law, funds schools based on enrollment counts. The law was built on pre-COVID growth projections that assumed enrollment would continue rising. Instead, the state is now roughly 32,300 students short of the initial Blueprint estimates for 2025-26. That gap means less funding flowing through the formula than lawmakers anticipated when they designed the program.

IAC Executive Director Alex Donahue suggested the state should focus on "enhancing and maintaining existing schools where possible rather than significantly expanding the number of facilities," a tacit acknowledgment that the growth the law anticipated is not coming.

What remains uncertain

The data cannot distinguish how much of each district's loss comes from which cause. Birth rate decline is well-documented at the state level but varies by county. Homeschooling data is not broken down by district in a way that maps cleanly onto enrollment losses. The immigration enforcement effect is likely concentrated in a few districts, but Maryland does not track enrollment by immigration status.

It is also unclear whether the 2026 drop represents a new equilibrium or an acceleration. The state had been roughly flat from 2023 to 2025, hovering around 858,000-859,000 students. The sudden drop to 849,698 could be a one-time correction, perhaps driven by the immigration enforcement shock, or the beginning of a steeper structural decline as smaller birth cohorts continue to enter the system.

Geoff Sanderson, Maryland's accountability chief, told the Baltimore Banner that the fall was "a bit of a surprise to us." The state's own projections had anticipated around 861,580 students for 2025-26. The actual figure of 849,698 undershot even those reduced projections by nearly 12,000.

The one exception

Kent County's 18-student gain stands out precisely because it is so small and so alone. Kent is Maryland's smallest district by enrollment at 1,609 students. It has been declining for years, losing 300 students since 2016. The 2026 uptick, a 1.1% increase, does not reverse that trend. But in a year when every other district shrank, it is the only data point running the other direction.

The question for Maryland is whether 2026 marks the moment when post-pandemic enrollment stagnation tipped into sustained decline. The birth pipeline suggests it does. The National Center for Education Statistics projects Maryland will lose about 8% of its students by 2031. If that trajectory holds, school systems that are at record lows today will need to make decisions about which buildings to keep open and which programs to fund, decisions that will define Maryland public education for a generation.

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.

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