Carroll - EdTribune MD - Maryland Education Data

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.

The COVID K Class Hits Third Grade

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 12:00:00 GMT

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

The wave nobody staffed for

Every grade in Maryland lost students this year except three. Grade 4 gained 2,103 students, Grade 12 added 547, and Grade 6 picked up 379. Grade 3 lost 2,470. Grades 3 and 4 sit side by side in elementary school hallways, and the contrast between them is not a coincidence. It is the same event, viewed from two angles.

The class that entered kindergarten in fall 2021, during the deepest trough of pandemic enrollment, is now in fifth grade. But the disruption it left behind did not end when families came back. The pandemic created an uneven sequence of kindergarten classes, some larger, some smaller, and that sequence is still moving through Maryland's grade structure like a pressure wave. Third grade absorbed the sharpest hit this year: a 3.7% decline, the largest at any grade level, as a relatively large cohort aged out and a smaller one took its place.

How cohort arithmetic works

The mechanics are straightforward, once you trace each class to its kindergarten origin.

The students in third grade last year (2024-25) were the kindergarten class of 2021-22: 61,671 children who entered school during the first big bounce-back from the pandemic trough. That was the largest K class since COVID hit, and as it moved through the grades, it inflated each one in turn. Third grade in 2024-25 reached 66,787.

This year, that bounce-back cohort moved to fourth grade, which is why fourth grade gained 2,103 students. The cohort replacing them in third grade entered kindergarten in 2022-23: just 60,986 students, about 700 fewer. The swap produced the largest single-grade decline in the state.

The pattern is predictable. Next year, when the K-2022 bounce-back class moves to fifth grade, that grade will likely see a gain. Third grade will receive the even smaller K-2023-24 class (60,514 kindergartners) and could shrink again. Each year, each grade experiences the pandemic's enrollment distortion on a slight delay.

A pipeline running dry

The COVID trough is only part of the story. Behind it, the kindergarten pipeline itself is contracting.

Maryland enrolled 65,087 kindergartners in 2019-20, an unusually large class and the highest in the dataset. By 2025-26, that number had fallen to 59,204, a decline of 9.0%. Even measured against the more typical 2018-19 class of 63,779, the current K class is 7.2% smaller. No post-COVID K class has come within 3,400 students of the pre-pandemic average. The average pre-COVID K class (2016 to 2020) was 64,463 students. The average post-COVID K class (2021 to 2026) is 60,055, a gap of roughly 4,400 students per year.

The immediate cause is demographic. Maryland's birth rate has been declining since the 2007-09 recession, and Montgomery County alone saw births fall from over 13,000 in 2014 to under 11,000 by 2023. "We are continuing to see an enrollment decline because of those live births and you can see where we are headed in the next six years," MCPS Capital Budget and Projects Manager Donald Connelly told the Montgomery County school board in October 2025.

But birth rates alone did not produce the jagged grade-by-grade pattern. The pandemic layered a one-time disruption on top of a long-term trend. The K-2021 class (58,391) was an anomaly, roughly 6,700 students smaller than the 2020 class (65,087). Many families delayed entry or chose homeschooling. When those families returned the following year, they created the K-2022 bounce-back. Now both the trough and the bounce are moving through the system simultaneously, producing adjacent grades that swing in opposite directions.

Where the losses landed

Montgomery^↗ lost more third-graders than any other district: 543 students, a 4.6% decline. Prince George's^↗ lost 403 (-4.0%), and Howard^↗ lost 201 (-4.7%). All three are large suburban systems where even modest percentage drops translate to hundreds of empty seats.

But the sharpest percentage declines hit smaller jurisdictions. Dorchester^↗ County lost 80 of its 361 third-graders, a 22.2% drop. Worcester^↗ lost 85 out of 491 (-17.3%). Carroll^↗ County fell 7.2%, and Frederick^↗ 5.2%. Only three of Maryland's 24 districts gained third-graders: Calvert (+31), Talbot (+24), and Allegany (+8).

The near-universality of the decline matters. When 21 of 24 districts lose students in the same grade in the same year, the explanation is structural. This is a cohort-size effect, not a policy failure in any single county.

Five cohorts, five trajectories

Tracking individual K classes as they age through the system reveals how differently each cohort moves.

The K-2019 class (63,779 kindergartners) followed a conventional trajectory, gaining students as it aged through elementary school. The K-2020 class (65,087) entered kindergarten just before the pandemic disrupted everything, and its progression was relatively normal. The K-2021 class (58,391) started far below the others, but has gained students at every grade since, absorbing children who delayed school entry. By Grade 5 in 2025-26, it had grown to 65,076, nearly closing the gap with older cohorts. The K-2022 bounce-back class (61,671) has been the largest post-COVID cohort at every grade it has passed through. And the K-2023 class (60,986) is tracking below its predecessor, continuing the downward pressure.

The K-2021 trough cohort's ability to grow as it ages is notable. It started at 58,391 and reached 65,076 by fifth grade, an increase of more than 6,600 students. Some of that growth reflects late school entry by students whose families held them out during the pandemic. Some reflects transfers into the public system. The data does not distinguish between the two.

The funding question

Maryland's Blueprint for Maryland's Future distributes funding on a weighted per-pupil basis. When a grade shrinks, the funding tied to those students shrinks with it. A 2,470-student decline in a single grade, at a statewide average above $17,000 per pupil, represents tens of millions in reduced per-pupil funding. Districts do not lose that money all at once, and some costs (building maintenance, administration) do not scale down with enrollment. The result is a structural mismatch between revenue that follows students and costs that follow buildings.

"One of the choices could be combining classes to make classes that are overly large or having classes that are smaller than we would normally prefer." — Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich, WJLA, October 2025

Maryland superintendents have asked the governor to "hold harmless" school funding for 2026-27, recognizing that the enrollment decline is accelerating. The state's 1.1% enrollment decline in 2025-26 was the largest since the pandemic's initial shock.

What comes next

The COVID trough cohort (K-2021, now in fifth grade) will enter middle school in 2027-28. When it does, sixth grade will absorb a noticeably smaller class. But the bounce-back class (K-2022) will follow one year later, partly cushioning the blow. The problem is that every K class since the bounce-back has been smaller than the one before it: 60,986 in 2023, 60,514 in 2024, 59,562 in 2025, 59,204 in 2026.

Maryland is not experiencing a single disruption that will wash through the system and leave normalcy behind. The pandemic created a sharp one-year dip, but it landed on top of a decade-long decline in births. Even after the COVID trough passes through high school and graduates, the classes entering behind it will be smaller than anything the pre-pandemic system was built to serve.

The question for Maryland's 24 school districts is not when the wave passes. It is whether they can right-size operations for a system that, kindergarten class by kindergarten class, is becoming permanently smaller.

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.