Kent - EdTribune MD - Maryland Education Data

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.

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.

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