Garrett - EdTribune MD - Maryland Education Data

Garrett County Has Not Grown in 7 Years

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

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

No district in Maryland has declined as persistently as Garrett County^↗. The state's westernmost school system has lost students every year since 2019-20, a seven-year streak unmatched by any of Maryland's other 23 districts. In 2025-26, Garrett enrolled 3,142 students, down 540 from its 2016 peak of 3,682, a 14.7% loss.

In a county of roughly 28,000 residents with a median age approaching 50, those 540 students represent something more than a budgeting inconvenience. They represent the difference between a school system that can sustain 12 buildings and one that may not be able to.

Seven years, no reprieve

Garrett's last year of growth was 2018-19, when enrollment ticked up by 12 students to 3,662. Every year since has been negative. The COVID years of 2020-21 and 2021-22 hit hardest, with losses of 138 and 140 students respectively. Those two years alone erased 278 students, roughly 7.7% of the pre-COVID total.

The losses have not stopped. Post-pandemic, Garrett has continued to shed 43 to 61 students per year. The 2025-26 loss of 51 students, or 1.6%, shows no sign that the decline is decelerating.

The next-longest active decline streak in Maryland belongs to Baltimore County and Talbot County, each at six years. But Baltimore County's six-year loss of 7,043 students represents 6.3% of its base, while Garrett's seven-year loss of 520 students represents 14.2% of its much smaller starting point. Percentage-wise, Garrett's erosion is more than twice as severe.

A 15-point gap with the state

Indexed to 2015-16, Garrett's enrollment stands at 85.3, meaning the district retains just 85 cents of every enrollment dollar it had a decade ago. Maryland statewide sits at 100.2 over the same period, essentially flat. The 14.9-point gap between Garrett and the state has widened every year since 2020.

That divergence is not just a Western Maryland story. Garrett's neighbor Allegany County has declined 8.5% over the same period, and Washington County, the largest Western Maryland district, has been roughly flat at -0.8%. Garrett's trajectory is steeper than both.

3,142 students spread across 12 schools. That is an average of 242 students per grade level, or roughly 262 per building. In any other context, those are small-school numbers. In Garrett County, they are the entire public school system.

The pipeline offers no relief

What stands out about Garrett's decline is its uniformity. Between 2019-20 and 2025-26, every single grade level lost students. Seventh grade lost 65 students (-21.4%), the steepest drop. Ninth grade lost 57 (-18.9%). Even 12th grade, where students who entered years ago are aging out, fell by 21 (-7.8%).

Kindergarten enrollment, which signals the incoming pipeline, has been volatile but directionally down. Garrett enrolled 288 kindergartners in 2015-16 and 239 in 2025-26, a 17.0% decline. The K-8 segment has contracted from 2,561 students in 2016 to 2,155 in 2026, a loss of 406 students or 15.9%. High school grades (9-12) have fallen from 1,121 to 987, a 12.0% decline.

The K-8 losses foreshadow what the high school will look like in four to five years, as those smaller elementary cohorts move upward through the system.

Where the students are going

Garrett County's enrollment decline tracks closely with its population decline. The county's estimated population has fallen from 30,144 in 2010 to roughly 28,175 in 2026, a 6.5% loss. The median age has climbed to 48.3 years, nearly a decade older than Maryland's statewide median of 39.8, reflecting a county where young families are leaving faster than they are arriving.

The most likely driver is demographic: fewer births and sustained outmigration of working-age adults. Garrett is 95% white with no significant immigration pipeline to offset natural population decline. Unlike suburban Maryland districts that can attract families from neighboring jurisdictions or benefit from international migration, Garrett draws from a fixed and shrinking pool. Notably, the county's population has declined roughly 6.5% since 2010 while school enrollment has fallen 14.7% since 2016, suggesting that enrollment is dropping faster than the population itself, likely reflecting the county's aging demographic profile.

A secondary factor may be economic. A 2023 commentary in the Baltimore Sun described the county as caught between "wealthy second homeowners" at Deep Creek Lake and "residents seeking social services," with a disappearing middle class. The author argued that Garrett's county commissioners provide only the legally required minimum funding for schools, despite a robust property tax base inflated by resort properties. Sub-par wages and a high cost of living driven by the vacation economy compound the difficulty of retaining families.

Whether school quality itself is contributing to outmigration is harder to establish. Garrett County Public Schools earned an average star rating of 3.45 on the 2024-25 MSDE report card, slightly above the state average of 3.35. Five of its 12 schools earned four stars. Academic performance, at least by state metrics, does not appear to be the problem.

Funding in a shrinking district

Maryland's Blueprint for Maryland's Future allocates state education funding through a per-pupil foundation formula weighted for student characteristics. A key provision for declining-enrollment districts: the formula uses the greater of prior-year enrollment or a three-year moving average, providing a buffer against sudden drops.

That buffer helps with one-year shocks. It does less for a district in its seventh consecutive year of decline, where the three-year average is itself declining. Each year Garrett loses 50 students, the moving average catches up to reality, and the funding floor drops with it.

The Maryland Department of Planning projects that Garrett will lose an additional 374 students, or 11.5%, between 2024 and 2033. If that projection holds, the district would fall below 2,900 students within the decade.

The homeschool unknown

Enrollment data alone cannot distinguish between families leaving Garrett County entirely and families switching to homeschooling or private alternatives within the county. Maryland does not publish homeschool enrollment at the county level in a way that allows year-over-year comparison. In a county where 84% of residents live in rural areas, homeschooling may be a more viable option than in dense suburban districts.

The data also cannot capture the operational consequences of losing 242 students per grade level in a 12-school system. At what point does a building become too small to staff efficiently? At what point does a school close? Those are decisions that enrollment trends can inform but not make.

Watching the kindergarten line

The question facing Garrett County is whether the decline flattens or accelerates. The county's population is aging, and each year's kindergarten class reflects birth cohorts from five years earlier, when the county was already shrinking. The 2025-26 kindergarten class of 239 is 17% smaller than the 2015-16 class of 288.

If Garrett's kindergarten enrollment continues at roughly 230 to 240 per year, the district is on a path toward 3,000 students by 2028 or 2029. At 12 schools, that is 250 students per building. The question is not whether the district is shrinking. It is whether 12 buildings can serve a district of that size, and what happens to the communities around them when they cannot.

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.