Duval County - EdTribune FL - Florida Education Data

Duval County Hits All-Time High: 45% of Jacksonville Students Chronically Absent

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction (April 12, 2026): An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Duval's 63,802 chronically absent students would constitute the fourth-largest school district in Florida and named Seminole County and Brevard as smaller. Both Brevard (78,425 students) and Seminole (68,967) are larger. The correct rank is 15th-largest, and the comparison districts have been updated to Manatee County and St. Johns County.

Duval County^↗ Superintendent Christopher Bernier has acknowledged what the data makes impossible to deny: his district "leads Florida in the percentage of habitually truant students." The numbers behind that admission are stark. In 2023-24, 63,802 of Jacksonville's 142,504 public school students were chronically absent — a rate of 44.8%, the highest in the district's recorded history and the worst among any large Florida district.

Part of the Florida Chronic Absenteeism series.

Four years of worsening

Duval's chronic absenteeism rate has risen every year since 2019-20. That year, with COVID truncating the school calendar, the rate actually dipped to 23.0%. Then came the surge: 31.8% in 2020-21, 39.0% in 2021-22, 41.3% in 2022-23, and 44.8% in 2023-24. Four consecutive years of worsening, with no sign of the plateau that has at least halted the deterioration in some Florida peers.

The trajectory separates Duval from every other large district in the state. Broward^↗ plateaued in the 33-34% range. Hillsborough^↗ has held around 31%. Miami-Dade^↗ stabilized near 28%. These districts are not recovering — none of them are close to pre-COVID levels — but they have at least stopped getting worse. Duval has not.

The 2023-24 increase of 3.5 percentage points is particularly discouraging. It came during a year that the district earned an "A" school grade from the state, a rating that primarily reflects test performance. The disconnect between academic metrics and physical attendance underscores a hard truth: a district can have improving test scores and a worsening attendance crisis simultaneously, because the students who are present may be performing better while the ones who are absent simply do not show up in the testing data.

The scale of 63,802

The absolute number has grown by 53% since 2018, when Duval recorded 41,736 chronically absent students at a rate of 28.6%. The increase of 22,066 students cannot be explained by enrollment changes — Duval's total enrollment actually declined slightly, from 146,118 to 142,504. More students are chronically absent from a smaller student body.

At 63,802, Duval's chronically absent population alone would constitute the 15th-largest school district in Florida — larger than Manatee County^↗ (57,213 students), larger than St. Johns County^↗ (53,471). These students are not all in the same situation: some miss 18 days, some miss 50, and the interventions that would help a family dealing with transportation barriers are different from those needed for a teenager in a mental health crisis. But the sheer volume overwhelms the capacity of existing support systems.

The Jacksonville Community Council launched Jacksonville Journey Forward with an initial request of $3 million to fund literacy and absenteeism interventions. The city's "Show Up to Shine" campaign targets school attendance through community partnerships. Whether these efforts can bend a four-year worsening trend remains to be seen.

A city-sized problem

Duval's position atop the large-district rankings is not close. At 44.8%, it leads second-place Polk County^↗ (39.1%) by 5.7 percentage points and the state average (31.4%) by 13.4 points. Among the 20 Florida districts with 50,000 or more students, Duval's rate is roughly double that of the best performer, Collier County^↗ (17.4%).

The gap matters because Duval is not a district of a few thousand students where a handful of families drive the rate. It enrolls 142,504 students across more than 190 schools in a major metropolitan area. The resources, infrastructure, and institutional capacity available to Jacksonville dwarf those of rural Gadsden or Taylor counties. The crisis in Duval cannot be attributed to the usual rural explanations of poverty, isolation, and thin services, though those factors certainly exist in parts of the county.

What Duval does share with the worst-affected rural districts is a trajectory that defies the modest stabilization happening elsewhere in Florida. The state's overall rate ticked up 0.4 points in 2024. Duval's ticked up 3.5. Something specific to Jacksonville is driving attendance worse, faster, than the statewide pattern — and identifying what that is should be the district's most urgent research priority.

Duval County Public Schools did not respond to a request for comment.

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

Florida Lost One in Eight Kindergartners

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction (2026-03-11): The total of the 10 largest district kindergarten declines has been corrected from 18,086 to 17,088.

Florida enrolled 179,414 kindergartners in 2025-26. That is 24,676 fewer than the 204,090 who showed up in 2014-15, a 12.1% decline over 11 years. At the other end of the building, 12th grade grew 17.6% over the same period, to 222,344. The state now graduates 42,930 more students each year than it enrolls in kindergarten.

Part of the Florida Enrollment 2026 series.

That gap did not exist a decade ago. In 2015, kindergarten enrollment exceeded 12th grade by 15,056. By 2018, the lines crossed. Every year since, the exiting class has been larger than the entering one, and the deficit has widened in every year but one.

The sharpest non-pandemic drop on record

The 2025-26 kindergarten class lost 11,380 students from the prior year, a 6.0% single-year decline. Only the pandemic year of 2020-21 was worse, when kindergarten fell by 16,313 as families kept five-year-olds home. But COVID was temporary: kindergarten bounced back by 12,952 in 2021-22 as delayed entrants arrived. This time there is no deferred class waiting in the wings.

What matters is the acceleration. From 2016 to 2018, kindergarten fluctuated within a narrow band, losing an average of 1,448 per year. From 2024 to 2026, the average annual loss tripled to 6,170. The three-year cumulative decline of 18,511 kindergartners since 2023-24 is larger than the total K enrollment of all but six Florida districts.

A system that is top-heavy and getting more so

Kindergarten enrollment is a leading indicator. The children who enter K today become the first graders, the fifth graders, and eventually the high school seniors whose headcount determines how many teachers a district hires and how much money it receives from Tallahassee. When fewer children enter the front of the pipeline, the entire system contracts on a lag.

One way to measure that lag is the pipeline ratio: the combined enrollment in K through second grade divided by the combined enrollment in 10th through 12th grade. When the ratio is above 1.0, the early grades are feeding more students into the system than the late grades are releasing. When it falls below 1.0, the system is shrinking from the bottom up.

Florida's pipeline ratio crossed below 1.0 in 2017 and has never returned. It has fallen in 10 of the past 11 years, from 1.06 in 2015 to 0.86 in 2026. Right now, there are 570,989 students in K through second grade and 665,888 in 10th through 12th, a deficit of 94,899. High school's share of the K-12 system grew from 30.5% to 32.9% over the same period, while elementary's share fell from 46.8% to 44.0%.

Fewer births, more exits to private school

Two forces are squeezing the kindergarten pipeline at the same time.

The first is demographic. Florida's birth count fell from roughly 224,000 in 2017 to 209,880 in 2020, a decline that aligns closely with the kindergarten trajectory five years later. Births partially recovered to 216,535 in 2021, but that recovery fell short of pre-pandemic levels. The children born during the 2020 trough are the kindergartners of 2025-26.

The second is school choice. Florida's universal voucher expansion, signed into law in 2023, removed income eligibility requirements and made every K-12 student eligible for a taxpayer-funded scholarship of roughly $8,000. By 2024-25, more than 350,000 students statewide held vouchers, with total program funding approaching $4 billion. Roughly 70% of new voucher recipients were already enrolled in private school before the expansion, meaning the program largely subsidized existing private enrollment. But the remaining 30% represent students who left or bypassed the public system altogether.

The kindergarten-to-first-grade retention ratio offers indirect evidence of diversion. In a typical year, first grade enrollment exceeds the prior year's kindergarten by about 3.3%, as students enter from private pre-K, homeschool, and other states. In 2026, that ratio fell to 101.1%, the lowest non-pandemic rate in the dataset. Fewer families appear to be flowing into the public system at the K-to-1 transition.

Neither mechanism alone explains a 12.1% decline. Falling births set the direction; vouchers may be steepening the slope. Housing costs add a third pressure. As the president of the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association told WUSF: "It's so expensive to live in Pinellas County that families, or people who would have a family, don't want to live here."

Where the losses concentrate

Kindergarten losses are not confined to a handful of large districts. Of 72 districts with data in both 2015 and 2026, 53 lost kindergartners, with a median decline of 12.3%. Among districts that enrolled at least 1,000 kindergartners in 2015, Pinellas^↗ lost the largest share: 30.3%, falling from 7,409 to 5,162. Broward^↗ lost the most in absolute terms: 4,432 kindergartners, a 23.4% decline. Hillsborough^↗ lost 2,646 (15.9%), and Duval^↗ lost 1,628 (14.8%).

The districts still gaining kindergartners are mostly fast-growing suburban and exurban communities. St. Johns^↗ added 645 kindergartners (26.5%), Pasco^↗ gained 569 (11.6%), and St. Lucie^↗ gained 365 (13.5%). But these gains do not offset the losses. The 10 largest district K declines total 17,088 students; the five largest gains total 2,286.

Buildings built for children who no longer exist

The closures have started. Broward, which has 45,000 empty seats across its 300 schools, approved the consolidation of six schools in January 2026, with seven more recommended for closure. Superintendent Howard Hepburn framed the decision bluntly:

"What we're trying to do is spend more money on the kids we have and less on the empty seats in an oversized footprint." — WLRN, August 2025

In Pinellas, the school board voted to close two schools operating at 20% and 40% capacity, with a second round of closures anticipated. Orange County, which lost 5,539 students in a single year, is considering closing seven schools to address a $41 million funding gap.

Florida's per-pupil funding formula sends dollars to districts based on headcount. Every kindergartner who does not show up is a missing allocation. When the entering class is 42,930 students smaller than the exiting class, the system loses revenue at one end while still staffing buildings designed for a larger population at the other.

What the pipeline predicts

The pipeline ratio of 0.86 means that for every 100 students in the upper grades, only 86 are coming up through the early grades to replace them. In-migration has historically supplemented Florida's K classes, as the K-to-first-grade ratio above 100% shows. But that supplement has been shrinking, and it would need to grow substantially to offset a 14-point pipeline deficit. Unless kindergarten enrollment reverses course, total enrollment will continue to fall for years as these smaller cohorts move through the system. The 179,414 kindergartners of 2026 will become the seniors of 2038, and the system will be calibrated to their size long before then.

The question is whether the 2026 kindergarten class represents a floor or a step on the way down. Florida's birth count in 2021 partially recovered from the 2020 trough, which should produce a modest kindergarten rebound around 2027. But the longer-term birth trend is downward, and the voucher program continues to expand. Whether the next kindergarten class is 180,000 or 175,000 will determine whether districts are planning for a plateau or a decade of closures.

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

St. Johns: Florida's Last Growing Giant

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT

St. Johns County^↗ added 151 students this year. That number would barely fill a single school bus. But in a state where every other top-20 district lost enrollment in 2026, it was enough to make St. Johns the last one standing.

Part of the Florida Enrollment 2026 series.

The district has grown every year since 2016, an 11-year streak that added 17,222 students and pushed enrollment from 35,163 to 52,385, a 49.0% increase. Among Florida districts with more than 10,000 students, nothing else comes close. Only three other districts in the state, Charlotte, Sumter, and Walton, have growth streaks of even five years, and none enrolls more than 17,100 students.

From Fastest-Growing to Barely Growing

The streak is intact, but the trajectory has changed. St. Johns grew by 7.8% in 2022, its fastest expansion on record, adding 3,466 students in a single year. That pace was unsustainable, and the district has decelerated every year since: 4.4% in 2023, 2.6% in 2024, 1.7% in 2025, and 0.3% in 2026.

That's not a gentle cooldown. It's a near-complete stop. In 2024, St. Johns accounted for 80% of all statewide enrollment growth. Florida's public schools added just 1,616 students that year, and 1,292 of them were in St. Johns. By 2026, the state lost 66,756 students, and St. Johns could not offset even a fraction of it.

The Sole Survivor Among Florida's Largest Districts

In 2026, all 19 other top-20 districts by enrollment lost students. Duval County^↗, St. Johns' neighbor to the north and the source of much of its in-migration, shed 2,524 students. Miami-Dade lost 14,325. Broward lost 7,276. Hillsborough lost 7,035.

A gain of 151 students is barely a rounding error. The district that added 3,466 students four years ago is now gaining fewer than the margin of error in most enrollment counts.

What Built the Streak

St. Johns' growth rests on three things, all of which are showing stress.

The first is residential construction. More than 350 housing developments are in construction or planning in the county, which is preparing for its population to double by 2050. Master-planned communities like Silverleaf and Nocatee have attracted families from Duval County and out of state, drawn by new housing stock and top-rated schools. But the housing market has softened. Pending home sales in St. Johns County fell 27.2% in September 2025, and median home prices declined 2.0% year-over-year in December 2025, suggesting that the flow of new families is decelerating.

The second is school quality. St. Johns ranked second among all Florida districts with an "A" grade in 2024, with math proficiency at 73% and reading at 72%, both well above the 52% state average. That reputation pulls families across the county line from Duval, where the district has consolidated schools and courted charter operators to fill underused buildings. But overcrowding is eroding the quality advantage. Parents at a February 2025 superintendent search forum described portables at newly opened schools and 33 teacher vacancies at Beachside High, which opened just three years earlier.

"The quality of the schools and stuff has gone down dramatically, the overcrowding of schools." -- Angelica Worsham, parent, News4Jax, Feb. 2025

The third is Florida's broader voucher expansion. Approximately 500,000 students statewide now use school vouchers, and the universal eligibility program adopted in 2023 has accelerated departures from public districts. St. Johns is not immune: the district reported more than 1,000 vouchers issued this year, diverting over $10 million in state funding to private and home-school students.

A Budget Shaped by Growth That No Longer Arrives

In February 2026, Superintendent Brennan Asplen warned of a $10 million to $15 million deficit for the 2026-2027 school year. The district had already frozen non-critical vacant positions and cut three administrative roles, saving $4.5 million. Student meal debt climbed to $228,500, up from $188,700 the previous year.

The fiscal math is straightforward. St. Johns' per-student funding exceeds $9,100, but the voucher program diverted $10 million that would otherwise flow through the Florida Education Finance Program. The district added just 151 students in 2026 while absorbing $1.7 million in teacher raises across 3,500 educators and unfunded pay increases for bus drivers, custodians, and maintenance workers. The infrastructure built for 3,000 new students a year now serves 151.

A Different District Than a Decade Ago

The families moving into St. Johns look different from the ones who were there in 2015. White students still make up the majority at 65.8%, but that share has fallen from 79.0% over 11 years, a 13.2 percentage-point decline. Hispanic enrollment nearly tripled, from 2,752 to 7,581, growing from 7.8% of the student body to 14.5%. Asian enrollment also nearly tripled, from 1,250 to 3,643. Multiracial students quadrupled from 810 to 3,561.

Black enrollment grew more slowly in absolute terms, adding 506 students, and its share actually fell from 7.3% to 5.9% as other groups grew faster. The non-white share of St. Johns' student body has risen from 21.0% to 34.2%. The district that once looked like a demographic outlier in Northeast Florida is converging, slowly, toward the state profile.

The Duval Mirror

St. Johns' story is inseparable from Duval's. The two districts share a metro area, and families who leave Duval County Public Schools often land in St. Johns. Since 2015, Duval has oscillated between 126,802 and 130,283 students while St. Johns climbed steadily from 35,163 to 52,385. Indexed to 2015 enrollment, St. Johns reached 149 while Duval hovers near 99.

Duval lost 2,524 students in 2026, its second-largest single-year decline in the dataset. The district is considering consolidation of several schools and has explored selling its Southbank headquarters. Whether the families Duval is losing are going to St. Johns, to private schools, or out of the metro entirely is a question enrollment data alone cannot answer.

What Kindergarten Says About What Comes Next

St. Johns' kindergarten enrollment peaked at 3,215 in 2024 and has since declined to 3,077 in 2026. The pipeline is thinning. Meanwhile, the district's 12th-grade class stands at 4,299, larger than the incoming kindergarten cohort by more than 1,200 students. That gap did not exist a decade ago, when the district enrolled 2,432 kindergartners against smaller upper-grade classes in a district half the current size.

At 0.3%, the growth streak is functionally over. What matters now is what happens to a district whose infrastructure, staffing model, and budget were built for 3,000 new students a year when that number drops to 151 — and the kindergarten pipeline says it won't recover.

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