EdTribune KS - Kansas Education Data

Kansas Lost 12,539 Students in Three Years

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Kansas 2025-26 Enrollment.

Kansas public schools gained 5,243 students across the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years, clawing back a third of the 16,114-student crater left by the pandemic. Two years felt like a turning point. It was not.

Since that brief recovery, Kansas has lost 12,539 students in three consecutive years of decline: 5,203 in 2023-24, 2,923 in 2024-25, and 4,413 in 2025-26. The state now enrolls 447,803 students, its lowest count since 2011 and 23,410 below its 2020 peak of 471,213, a 5.0% drop. In 2025-26 alone, 181 districts lost students while just 92 gained. For every Kansas district that grew, two shrank.

The shape of the cliff

The three-year loss is not a smooth slide. The 2023-24 drop of 5,203 was the steepest, followed by a comparatively mild 2024-25 (-2,923), then a re-acceleration in 2025-26 (-4,413). The combined -12,539 is the second-worst three-year stretch in the 22-year dataset, trailing only the 2019-2022 window that included the pandemic year itself (-12,703).

What makes this stretch different from COVID is its breadth. The pandemic produced a single catastrophic year followed by recovery. The current decline has ground on for three years with no sign of reversal. Kansas now sits 35,917 students below where a linear projection of its 2015-2020 growth trend would have placed it, a gap that grows each year.

Where the students disappeared

The losses are concentrated in the state's largest districts. Wichita^↗, the biggest district in Kansas, shed 1,948 students over the three years, falling to an all-time low of 44,636, a 4.2% decline. Kansas City^↗ USD 500 lost 1,889 (8.2%). Olathe^↗, the second-largest district, dropped 1,204 (4.2%). Lawrence^↗ lost 800 (7.4%).

The top five declining districts account for a third of all three-year losses statewide. But the erosion reaches well beyond the big systems. Of 276 districts, 208 lost students over the three-year window. Leavenworth^↗ fell 13.7%. Emporia^↗ dropped 9.7%. Garden City^↗, a meatpacking hub that had long bucked state trends through immigration-driven growth, slid 5.2%.

The handful of districts that grew tell their own stories. Andover^↗ added 1,814 students (+20.0%), though this district has a history of boundary changes and its 2026 jump of 1,331 in a single year may reflect a structural shift rather than organic growth. Spring Hill^↗ gained 676 (13.0%), continuing its streak as a fast-growing Kansas City suburb. Smoky Valley added 647 (63.6%), likely reflecting a virtual program expansion.

Fewer babies, more exits

The most straightforward explanation for the decline is demographic. Kansas's birth rate in 2023 fell to 11.6 per 1,000, the lowest since records began in 1912. The number of Kansas children under five has dropped more than 15% since 2014-15, according to the same analysis by the Kansas Association of School Boards. Smaller birth cohorts that entered kindergarten five and six years ago are now propagating through the system, with no larger cohorts behind them to fill the gap.

Net out-migration compounds the problem. Kansas lost a net 26,000 residents to other states during the 2010s, and the kindergarten-to-twelfth-grade pipeline has inverted: Kansas enrolled 29,546 kindergartners in 2025-26 but 34,955 twelfth-graders. For every 100 seniors graduating, only 85 kindergartners are entering the system. That ratio was above 100 as recently as 2020.

Competition from non-public education is a contributing factor, though its scale is harder to pin down. Full-time virtual school enrollment in Kansas rose from 5,658 in 2019-20 to 9,857 in 2023-24. The state's Tax Credit Scholarship program for private schools grew from 109 scholarships in 2016 to 2,360 in 2024-25. Kansas legislators have introduced a $125 million voucher proposal (SB 75) that would offer up to $8,000 per child for private school tuition. If enacted, it could accelerate departures from public enrollment.

But these programs are still small relative to the decline. The 2,360 tax credit scholarships and roughly 4,200 additional virtual FTE since 2020 together account for a fraction of the 23,410-student drop from the 2020 peak. Birth rates and out-migration remain the primary drivers.

The fiscal arithmetic

Kansas funds schools through a per-pupil formula. The base amount for 2025-26 is $5,615 per student, with additional weightings for at-risk students, bilingual learners, special education, and transportation. When enrollment drops, funding follows. The 12,539 students lost since 2023 represent roughly $70 million in base funding alone, before weightings.

Total per-pupil spending has reached $18,858, a record. But that figure partly reflects the denominator shrinking: fewer students dividing a budget that hasn't contracted as fast as enrollment. Districts collectively held $3.1 billion in cash reserves as of July 2025, including $1.33 billion for operations. Those reserves mask the structural problem. Fixed costs for buildings, transportation routes, and administrative overhead don't shrink proportionally when a district loses 50 or 100 students.

"The decline is primarily due to falling birth rates and to more Kansans leaving the state than moving in, indicating further loss of enrollment is likely." -- Kansas Association of School Boards, September 2025

A widening gap between growers and shrinkers

The ratio of declining to growing districts has shifted decisively. In 2022, the post-COVID rebound briefly pushed more districts into the gain column than the loss column. By 2026, that ratio had flipped to nearly two-to-one: 181 districts declining, 92 growing.

Eighty-six districts, 31.2% of the total, hit their all-time enrollment low in 2025-26. Only 11 hit all-time highs. Among those at rock bottom: Wichita^↗ (44,636), Topeka Public Schools^↗ (12,259), Garden City (6,842), and Emporia (3,656). The list spans the state's urban cores, its meatpacking communities, and its military-adjacent districts.

Only 70 of 273 districts that existed in both 2020 and 2026 have recovered to their pre-pandemic enrollment, a 25.6% recovery rate. Kansas is not bouncing back from COVID. It is settling into a lower baseline that continues to erode.

What to watch next

The kindergarten pipeline offers no relief. The 29,546 kindergartners enrolled in 2025-26 is the lowest count in the 22-year dataset, down 10.1% from 32,853 in 2005 and down 20.2% from the peak of 37,006 in 2014. These small cohorts will ripple through the system for the next 12 years, compressing enrollment at every grade level as they advance.

The 2026 re-acceleration, after a milder 2025 that briefly looked like a floor, suggests Kansas has not found stable ground. Federal funding cuts of $5 million to Kansas City USD 500, $1 million each to Olathe and Shawnee Mission pile onto the enrollment-driven revenue slide. Legislative proposals for expanded school choice remain active.

In Wichita, where the district has already shuttered six schools and scheduled four more for closure, the planning horizon has shifted from "if" to "which ones next." Eighty-six districts across the state are at their lowest enrollment on record. Twelve years of smaller kindergarten cohorts are already in the pipeline. The 2026-27 class, born during the lowest birth year Kansas has ever recorded, arrives in the fall.

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

Goddard's 18-Year Growth Streak Was the Longest in Kansas

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Kansas 2025-26 Enrollment.

For 18 consecutive years, Goddard^↗ USD 265 grew. From 2006 through 2023, the district west of Wichita added students every single school year, pushing enrollment from 4,035 to 6,135. No other Kansas district came close. Piper-Kansas City^↗ managed 17 years. Five suburban districts around Kansas City clocked 15 before COVID broke their runs in 2021.

Then, quietly, in 2024, Goddard lost 42 students. The streak was over.

What followed was not a recovery. After a brief 70-student bounce in 2025, Goddard shed 139 students in 2026, dropping to 6,024. The district that spent nearly two decades as the steadiest growth engine in Kansas public education is now contracting in a state where 180 of 276 districts lost enrollment last year.

Eighteen years of additions, then a wall

The numbers tell a story of momentum that built slowly, surged, and then stalled. In the early years, Goddard added 55 to 100 students annually. The district accelerated in 2007 and 2008, gaining 298 and 228 students, respectively, during a housing construction boom. Growth cooled during the recession, dipping to 33 students in 2013, before a second wave in 2014 and 2019 brought the largest annual gains: 192 and 325 students.

Over the full 18-year streak, Goddard added 2,100 students, a 52.0% increase. The average annual gain was 117 students per year. That pace placed Goddard in rare company: among Kansas districts with at least 3,000 students, only Andover^↗ grew faster in percentage terms over the same span.

The year-over-year pattern reveals the streak was already fading before it officially broke. The 2023 gain was just seven students, the smallest positive increment in 21 years. The two subsequent losses, -42 in 2024 and -139 in 2026, look less like aberrations and more like the natural terminus of a growth curve that had been flattening since 2020.

What built the streak, and what ended it

Goddard sits in Sedgwick County's western growth corridor, where subdivision development pushed into farmland for two decades. A 2024 study cited by the district identified 53 active housing developments within district boundaries, with more than 5,900 residential units planned. The city of Goddard itself grew 25.5% between the 2020 census and 2026 estimates, reaching roughly 6,400 residents.

So why is the district shrinking even as rooftops multiply?

The most plausible explanation is a pipeline problem. Goddard's kindergarten class has declined from 413 in 2020 to 333 in 2026, a 19.4% drop in six years. Meanwhile, its 12th-grade class numbered 523 in 2026. Every year, Goddard graduates more students than it enrolls as kindergartners. New housing may still be bringing families in, but smaller birth cohorts statewide mean those families have fewer school-age children.

Kansas births fell to 11.6 per 1,000 residents in 2023, the lowest rate since the state began keeping records in 1912. The population under 18 has dropped by more than 36,000, or 5%, since 2015. That demographic undertow pulls against even the most aggressive suburban growth.

A competing factor is the broader expansion of alternatives to traditional public school. A 2024 KCUR analysis found that thousands of Kansas families who discovered homeschooling during the pandemic chose to stay with it. The state's growing virtual school sector also siphons students without requiring a physical move, and Goddard's own virtual program is among the options families now weigh.

A $196 million plan that voters rejected

The district saw the growth coming, even if the current dip complicates the timing. In December 2024, the USD 265 Board of Education unanimously approved a $196 million bond proposal to build two new elementary schools, convert Oak Street Elementary into a pre-K learning center, and upgrade facilities across the district.

"Just like in the early 2000s, the Goddard community itself was one of the fastest growing cities in Kansas. We are experiencing that growth again." -- Dane Baxa, Goddard Education Foundation, KWCH, April 2025

On May 13, 2025, voters rejected the bond by roughly 500 votes: 2,541 against, 2,053 in favor. The measure would have raised property taxes by about $10 per month per $100,000 of assessed home value. In a district where one-third of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, that cost proved decisive.

The failure leaves the district planning around 5,900 incoming residential units with no new school buildings on the horizon.

Goddard in the suburban pack

Goddard is one of four Wichita-area suburbs, along with Andover, Maize^↗, and Derby^↗, that have collectively grown from 29.5% of metro-area enrollment in 2005 to 41.8% in 2026. But the growth has not been evenly distributed.

Andover's trajectory is in a different category entirely: it enrolled 3,411 students in 2005 and 10,866 in 2026, a 218.6% increase amplified by a boundary change in 2014. Maize grew 36.5% over the same period. Derby gained 11.5%. Goddard, at 49.3%, sits squarely in the middle.

Wichita^↗ itself dropped to an all-time low of 44,636 students. The four suburbs now enroll 32,067 students combined, up from 19,758 in 2005. The suburban donut that once supplemented Wichita is increasingly replacing it as the center of enrollment gravity in Sedgwick County.

What separates Goddard from Andover is partly geography and partly timing. Andover's 2026 surge of 1,331 students suggests it may be absorbing the growth that Goddard can no longer capture. Whether that reflects land availability, school quality perceptions, or simply the path of new highway infrastructure is not clear from enrollment data alone.

A district that is also diversifying

Goddard's student body has changed substantially during the growth streak. White enrollment dropped from 93.2% to 74.4% of the total, a 18.8 percentage-point decline. Hispanic enrollment more than quadrupled from 168 students (4.2%) to 818 (13.6%). Multiracial students now make up 6.3% of enrollment, up from near zero in 2005.

The district remains whiter than the state average of 60.0%, but the gap is closing. Meanwhile, the share of students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch has nearly doubled from 17.5% to 32.1%, reflecting both the broader economic pressures on suburban families and the district's increasing socioeconomic diversity.

The question Goddard cannot yet answer

The tension at the center of Goddard's story is that the district is simultaneously contracting in headcount and expecting future growth from housing construction. Those 5,900 planned residential units are real. So is the kindergarten class of 333, down from 413 six years ago.

Piper-Kansas City, the district with the second-longest streak at 17 years, lost 189 students in 2026, ending its own run. Five of the top 10 streak holders saw their streaks broken by COVID in 2021. The pattern across Kansas is consistent: suburban growth that once seemed structural is colliding with a demographic reality where there are simply fewer children entering the pipeline each year.

With 5,900 residential units on the drawing board and no new schools to put them in, Goddard is building a subdivision-era district on a post-subdivision budget. Voters said no to $196 million. The kindergarten class of 333 said something quieter but harder to reverse. The streak that defined Goddard for 18 years is over, and the 2027 cohort, born during the lowest birth years in Kansas history, will arrive at Oak Street Elementary to find a building the district had planned to convert into a pre-K center. The conversion is on hold. So is much of what Goddard thought came next.

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

In Turner-KC, a 43-Point Demographic Reversal

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Kansas 2025-26 Enrollment.

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that statewide Hispanic enrollment grew in 20 of 21 years and that white enrollment fell every year without exception. Hispanic enrollment grew in 19 of 21 years (declining in 2021 and 2026), and white enrollment declined in 20 of 21 years (with a small uptick in 2014). The text has been corrected.

In 2005, two out of three students in Turner-Kansas City^↗ USD 202 were white. By 2026, fewer than one in four are. The 43.5 percentage-point collapse in white enrollment share is the largest in Kansas, more than double the statewide shift of 15.8 points over the same period.

Turner did not shrink during this transformation. Total enrollment held essentially steady at 3,695, just 109 students more than in 2005. What changed was not the number of students walking through the doors. It was who they were.

Where 1,533 white students went and 1,270 Hispanic students came from

The arithmetic is stark. Turner lost 1,533 white students between 2005 and 2026, a 63.9% decline. Hispanic enrollment nearly tripled, rising from 669 to 1,939, a gain of 1,270 students. Hispanic students now make up 52.5% of the district. Black enrollment held steady around 410-450 students, while multiracial students grew from 53 to 231.

The crossover happened in 2012. That year, white students fell below 50% for the first time, and Turner became a majority-minority district. The shift has only accelerated since: white share dropped another 25.8 percentage points in the 14 years that followed.

Turner is not an isolated case. It sits in Wyandotte County's rapidly diversifying corridor in the Kansas City metro, where the same forces are reshaping every school system, each on its own timeline.

The Wyandotte corridor: a transformation in stages

Neighboring Piper-Kansas City^↗ USD 203, just north of Turner in Wyandotte County, started the period even whiter, at 83.8%. Piper's white share has fallen 35.5 percentage points to 48.3%, crossing the majority-minority threshold in 2024, twelve years after Turner did. Piper, unlike Turner, has also grown substantially, more than doubling from 1,310 to 2,733 students over the period. The district approved a $64 million bond in 2022 in response to being the third fastest-growing district in Kansas, with students speaking more than 27 languages.

Bonner Springs^↗, also in Wyandotte County, dropped from 83.6% to 55.3% white, a 28.3 percentage-point shift. It has not yet crossed the majority-minority line, but at the current pace, it will within a few years.

Kansas City^↗ USD 500, the county's largest district and fifth-largest in the state, was already majority-minority in 2005 at 19.2% white. By 2026, white students account for just 7.3% of its 21,113 students. Hispanic enrollment has risen from 29.5% to 55.0%, and Hispanic students have surpassed Black students as the largest group, a reversal of the district's historical composition.

Turner leads the state, but the pattern is wider

Among districts with at least 500 students in 2005, Turner's 43.5 percentage-point white share drop is eight points larger than the next-closest district. The top 10 list includes suburban Kansas City districts like Haysville (-28.4 points), Spring Hill (-25.8 points), and Gardner Edgerton (-25.2 points), alongside meatpacking towns like Scott County (-30.3 points). The common thread is not one industry or one city. It is a statewide recomposition playing out at different speeds.

Eight Kansas districts crossed from majority-white to majority-minority between 2005 and 2026. Turner was the first and most complete crossing, but Piper, Lakin, Kismet-Plains, Hugoton, Coffeyville, Geary County, and Emporia have all followed. In 2005, eight Kansas districts with 100 or more students were majority-minority. By 2026, that number has risen to 18.

Statewide, white enrollment share has fallen from 75.8% to 60.0% over the period, while Hispanic share has doubled from 10.3% to 21.1%. Kansas has added 49,200 Hispanic students since 2005. The state lost 65,698 white students over the same period.

What is driving the shift in Turner

The most likely driver is the broader demographic transformation of Wyandotte County. Census estimates show that Wyandotte County's Hispanic population has grown from roughly 16% in 2000 to 34.1% in 2024, making Hispanic residents the county's second-largest group behind white residents at 36.4%. The county is already majority-minority, and its modest population growth of 1.7% since 2019 has been sustained largely by Hispanic residents.

The Kansas City metro area's Hispanic community has grown through a combination of migration from Latin America and secondary migration from other U.S. metros. KCUR reported in 2024 that Johnson County added nearly 16,000 Hispanic residents between 2010 and 2020 alone, outpacing white population growth. Unlike the meatpacking-driven Hispanic growth in southwestern Kansas towns like Dodge City and Liberal, the metro area's growth has been fueled by construction, agriculture, landscaping, and food service.

A competing explanation for part of the white share decline is residential sorting. As neighborhoods diversified, some white families may have enrolled children in private schools or moved to Johnson County suburbs. This is a common pattern nationally, though no Kansas-specific study has measured the magnitude. Turner's total enrollment stability, with only a modest 3% net gain over 21 years, is consistent with offsetting flows: new families arriving as others leave.

The funding question no one has answered

The demographic shift carries fiscal consequences. Kansas provides bilingual education funding through a weighting in the school finance formula: districts receive the greater of 0.395 times the full-time-equivalent count of students receiving ESOL services, or 0.185 times the headcount. A legislative task force was reviewing the adequacy of these weights as recently as mid-2025, reflecting growing concern that the formula has not kept pace with the scale of the need.

Turner's free and reduced-price lunch rate has climbed from 50.6% to 77.9% over the period, meaning the district is also navigating poverty-related instructional costs alongside language services. Federal Title III funding, which supports English learner instruction, was briefly withheld from Kansas districts in 2025. Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools alone stood to lose $854,864 in English learner and immigrant student funding.

"They will not have access to fair education." -- KCUR, July 2025, quoting a Shawnee Mission ESL teacher on the impact of federal funding freezes

The Shawnee Mission superintendent warned that the district would be forced to reallocate local funds to cover the gap, pulling resources from other programs. The federal funding was ultimately released, but the episode exposed how vulnerable bilingual programs remain to disruption, particularly in districts where the student population has changed faster than the staffing pipeline.

A preview of Kansas in 2040

Turner's transformation is not anomalous. It is an early indicator of what Kansas as a whole is becoming. Statewide Hispanic enrollment grew in 19 of the last 21 years, from 45,408 to 94,608, dipping only during COVID in 2021 and again slightly in 2026. White enrollment has fallen in 20 of 21 years, from 334,316 to 268,618, interrupted only by a brief uptick of 861 students in 2014. If the statewide trends of the past decade continue, white share will fall below 55% before 2035.

Turner's teaching staff remains overwhelmingly white and English-speaking, a legacy of the district it used to be. The bilingual weighting in the Kansas school finance formula was designed for a few dozen ELL students, not a district where a majority of families speak Spanish at home. Three-quarters of Turner's students now qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, up from half in 2005. The students walked through the doors. The adults on the other side are still catching up.

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

Kansas Publishes 2025-26 Enrollment Data

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Kansas 2025-26 Enrollment.

The number that landed on superintendent desks across Kansas this fall was 447,803. That is 4,413 fewer students than last year, 12,539 fewer than three years ago, and the lowest headcount the state has posted since 2011.

The Kansas State Department of Education's 2025-26 enrollment figures put to rest any notion that the post-COVID enrollment slide was leveling off. Last year's milder loss of 2,923 had suggested stabilization. This year's 4,413 re-accelerated the decline. The three-year drop of 12,539 students is more than double what the state clawed back in two years of post-COVID recovery. At the current pace, Kansas will fall below 440,000 before this decade ends.

What the numbers open up

The enrollment data covers 276 districts across 22 years, from virtual schools with 24 students to Wichita^↗'s 44,636. Over the coming weeks, The KSEdTribune will unpack it in a series of data-driven articles. Here is what jumps out first.

Kansas lost 12,539 students in three years — and the decline is accelerating. After recovering 5,243 students in 2021-22 and 2022-23, the state has given back every gain and then some. The three-year decline of 5,203, then 2,923, then 4,413 represents the steepest sustained loss in the state's modern history outside of the pandemic year itself. In 2025-26 alone, 181 districts lost students while just 92 gained.

One in three districts just hit rock bottom. Eighty-six of 276 Kansas districts recorded their lowest enrollment in the 22-year dataset in 2025-26. The list includes Wichita, Topeka Public Schools^↗, Garden City, Hutchinson, and Emporia. Only 11 districts set all-time highs.

A single rural district went from 24 students to 2,160 in two years. Elk Valley USD, almost certainly a virtual school, exploded from 24 students in 2023-24 to 2,160 in 2025-26 — a 9,000% increase that makes it the fastest-growing entity in state history, if "growing" is the right word for a district where 500 students are in 11th grade and only 46 are in kindergarten.

By the numbers: 447,803 students statewide in 2025-26 — down 12,539 from the 2022-23 post-recovery peak, a 2.7% decline across three years and the lowest enrollment since 2011.

The threads we are following

White students still make up 60% of Kansas enrollment, but the margin is shrinking. White share fell from 70.3% in 2005 to 60.0% in 2026, losing 32,517 students while Hispanic enrollment grew by 23,505. In 14 districts, more than half of students are Hispanic — concentrated in the meatpacking corridor of southwest Kansas.

Kansas has lost 22 school districts in 21 years. The number of operating districts fell from 298 in 2005 to 276 in 2026. Meanwhile, 177 districts now enroll fewer than 500 students, and 59 enroll fewer than 150. Rural consolidation is no longer theoretical in Kansas — it is arithmetic.

Special education now serves one in seven students. The special education share has climbed from 12.5% to 14.3% over 22 years, adding 4,400 students even as total enrollment fell by 18,200. The funding gap between per-pupil costs and state reimbursement widens each year.

What comes next

This is the first in a series of articles examining what the 2025-26 enrollment data reveals about Kansas public schools. New articles publish weekly on Mondays.

The enrollment figures come from KSDE Data Central. The data covers headcount enrollment for public school districts statewide.

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