Calvert - 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.

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.