Hillsborough - 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.

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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.

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Pasco's 10-Year Growth Streak Ends

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

For a decade, Pasco^↗ County was Florida's enrollment machine. From 2016 through 2025, the district north of Tampa added students every single year, gaining 17,366 in total, a 25.1% increase. Only one other large Florida district, St. Johns, matched that consistency. The district grew through a national pandemic, through a statewide enrollment crash, through the expansion of universal vouchers. It kept growing when its neighbors started shrinking.

Part of the Florida Enrollment 2026 series.

In 2026, the streak ended. Pasco lost 350 students, dropping from 86,584 to 86,234, a 0.4% decline. The number itself is small. The pattern it breaks is not.

Three years of warning signs

The 2026 loss did not arrive out of nowhere. Pasco's year-over-year growth peaked at 4,029 students in 2022, the post-COVID rebound year when families flooded back into the district. Every year since has been smaller: 2,893 in 2023, 1,807 in 2024, 776 in 2025. The slowdown was obvious: three straight years of smaller gains before the number went negative.

The 2026 decline is the endpoint of that slowdown, not a sudden shock. Whatever was pushing families into Pasco's schools ran out of momentum gradually, not all at once.

The suburban growth model runs out of runway

Pasco's growth story was a Tampa Bay sprawl story. As housing costs rose in Hillsborough^↗ and Pinellas^↗ counties, families moved north to Pasco's newer subdivisions. The district added capacity, opened schools, and absorbed the migration.

That model depends on a continuous inflow of families with school-age children, and several forces are now working against it.

Florida's universal voucher expansion in 2023 removed income limits, making private and home-school options accessible to a broader set of families. State funding diverted to vouchers doubled from 12% to 24% of education spending between the 2021 and 2025 school years, reaching $3.8 billion. Pasco Superintendent John Legg told the Tampa Bay Times that the district had already fallen 1,500 students short of enrollment projections in the 2024-25 school year, costing roughly $5 million in anticipated state funding. Homeschooling participation in Pasco rose nearly 11-fold in three years, and private school enrollment nearly quintupled.

The voucher program's role is difficult to isolate from other factors. About 69% of students newly receiving vouchers were already enrolled in private schools before receiving the scholarship, according to Step Up for Students, the largest voucher administrator. That suggests most voucher dollars are subsidizing existing private school families rather than pulling students from public schools, though the subsidy may be enabling some families to stay in private school who otherwise would have returned to the public system.

What reporting suggests

The Tampa Bay region's enrollment decline is generating real budget consequences. WUSF reported that district leaders across the area cite population shifts, homeschooling growth, and vouchers as the primary drivers.

"A large part of the challenge is this continued attempt to make it harder and harder for public schools to meet the needs of our students." — Andrew Spar, Florida Education Association president, WUSF, Sept. 2025

Pasco's response to the shift has included a new Flexible Education program allowing homeschool families to enroll students in up to three public school courses, funded through Step Up for Students scholarships. The district surveyed approximately 6,000 homeschool families to gauge interest, an acknowledgment that many school-age children still live in Pasco but are no longer counted in its enrollment.

A regional pattern, not an outlier

Pasco's decline is the mildest in Tampa Bay. All five districts in the metro area lost students in 2026. Pinellas^↗ dropped 4.8%, Hillsborough^↗ fell 3.2%, Hernando^↗ lost 0.9%, and Polk^↗ declined 0.5%. Pasco's 0.4% loss puts it at the shallow end of a region-wide contraction.

Nine Florida districts that had been growing consecutively through at least 2022 all turned negative in 2026: Pasco, Polk, Lee, Osceola, Flagler, Manatee, Marion, St. Lucie, and Suwannee. These are not legacy urban districts with long histories of decline. They are the sprawl corridors, the I-4 corridor suburbs, the fast-growing communities that had been absorbing Florida's population boom. When they all flip in the same year, something bigger than local conditions is at work.

Statewide, 61 of 77 Florida districts lost students in 2026. Pasco was Florida's top district for absolute enrollment growth from 2020 to 2025, adding 9,940 students over that span, more than Polk (+8,747), St. Johns (+8,708), or St. Lucie (+7,389). If the state's fastest-growing large district can't hold its numbers, the growth era in Florida public education may be over.

A district becoming a different place

The 350-student net loss masks a deeper compositional shift. White enrollment in Pasco peaked at 47,310 in 2023 and has since fallen by 3,848 students in three years, including a loss of 1,523 in 2026 alone. Every other racial and ethnic group grew in 2026: Hispanic students added 526, multiracial students 263, Asian students 256, and Black students 158.

In 2015, white students made up 65.3% of Pasco's enrollment. By 2026, that share had fallen to 50.4%. Hispanic enrollment more than kept pace with the overall district growth, rising from 14,339 to 24,526 over the same period, a 71% increase. Pasco's entire net enrollment growth of approximately 17,000 students since 2015 was driven by non-white enrollment. White enrollment actually fell by 1,761 over that span.

The diversification isn't unique to Pasco — it mirrors patterns across Florida's suburban growth corridors. But 14.9 percentage points in 11 years makes it one of the fastest such shifts in Tampa Bay.

The kindergarten signal

The grade-level data offers the clearest warning about what comes next. In 2015, Pasco enrolled 678 more kindergartners than 12th graders. By 2026, the relationship had inverted: kindergarten (5,484) now sits 1,014 students below 12th grade (6,498).

This pipeline inversion means Pasco is graduating larger cohorts than it is enrolling. The 2026 grade-level changes confirm it: grade 8 lost 560 students (the largest single-grade decline), while grade 9 gained 484 and grade 12 gained 357 as large cohorts moved up. The elementary grades, kindergarten through third, all lost students.

For a district that has been building schools and hiring staff to accommodate growth, the reversal requires a different kind of planning. Superintendent Legg has described the coming year as "a lean budget year" with "significant adjustments," including an early learning center closure to avoid $1.5 million in projected losses.

What the data cannot answer

The enrollment data does not distinguish between families who left the public system entirely and families who left Pasco County. The county's population continues to grow, adding an estimated 3.4% in the past year according to census estimates. That means more families with children may be living in Pasco but choosing private, charter, or home-school options. The district's own data show charter enrollment within Pasco grew by 900 students in the same year that traditional public enrollment fell.

Pasco's 2026 loss is small enough, 0.4%, that a single policy shift or a strong housing development cycle could reverse it. But the deceleration pattern, the demographic composition shift, and the kindergarten pipeline all point in the same direction. The streak is over. The real test is whether a district that grew by 25% in a decade can learn to manage with less.

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

Nearly 9 in 10 Florida Districts Lost Students in 2026

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In a typical year before the pandemic, roughly one in three Florida school districts lost students. In 2021, COVID pushed that figure above 90%. That breadth was supposed to be a crisis-year anomaly.

Part of the Florida Enrollment 2026 series.

In 2025-26, 59 of Florida's 67 regular school districts lost enrollment, 88.1% of the total. The loss spans every size category, every region, and most of the state's largest systems. Statewide enrollment fell to 2,786,275, erasing a full decade of growth and returning Florida to a level last seen in 2016.

The COVID parallel no one anticipated

The comparison to 2021 is worth unpacking. COVID was a shock: 92.5% of regular districts lost students in a single year, then the system bounced back sharply. By 2022, only 22.4% of districts were declining. The recovery looked robust.

That recovery is now fully unwound. The share of declining districts climbed from 22.4% in 2023 to 61.2% in 2024 to 65.7% in 2025 to 88.1% in 2026. The progression is steady, not sudden. And of the 42 districts that lost students in both 2025 and 2026, 33 lost more in the second year, an acceleration that suggests the bottom is not yet in sight.

The composition is different from COVID. The pandemic concentrated losses in a single catastrophic year followed by recovery. The current decline is the culmination of a three-year slide. Between 2024 and 2026, Florida public schools lost 79,633 students, exceeding the entire COVID-year loss.

Five districts carry the weight

Miami-Dade^↗, Broward^↗, Hillsborough^↗, Palm Beach^↗, and Orange^↗ together lost 40,875 students in 2026, accounting for 61.2% of the statewide decline. Each of these five districts has enrollment above 180,000. Each lost at least 2.7%.

Miami-Dade's loss of 14,325 students, a 4.3% drop, was the largest single-district decline in the state. The district typically gains 7,000 to 8,000 new students from other countries each year. In fall 2025, only 1,800 arrived, a collapse linked to tightened immigration enforcement and the cost of living in South Florida.

Broward, down 7,276 students (3.0%), now carries 50,000 empty seats across 300 schools and faces a $94 million budget hole. Superintendent Howard Hepburn described the math at a December board meeting:

"The county itself is not growing in population of students and so we're kind of cannibalizing other schools when we don't address what we need to in the school with the lower population." — WLRN, Dec. 2025

Broward has closed six schools and is weighing further consolidations, with final decisions expected for the 2026-27 school year.

Size offers no shelter

Every size tier of Florida school district is losing students. All eight districts with 100,000 or more students declined. All 13 districts between 20,000 and 50,000 declined. It cuts across every fault line in the state: Panhandle districts like Okaloosa^↗ (down 3.2%) are declining alongside Gulf Coast districts like Collier^↗ (down 2.7%), university towns like Alachua^↗ (down 2.9%), and state capital Leon^↗ (down 2.2%).

Among the 18 districts in the 5,000-to-20,000 range, 14 declined. Among the 20 smallest districts, 17 declined.

The eight regular districts that gained students in 2026 illustrate how narrow the exceptions are. Dixie^↗ led with 582 new students, a 32.5% jump. But Dixie is a rural district of 2,372 students, and its sudden growth, from 1,790 to 2,372, departs sharply from a four-year decline that took it to a low of 1,790 in 2025. The spike warrants scrutiny: virtual school enrollment or a facility change could explain a jump of this magnitude in a county of 17,000 people.

Sumter^↗, home to The Villages retirement community, added 468 students (4.7%) and has grown steadily for a decade, now at 10,422 students. St. Johns^↗, long Florida's fastest-growing district, eked out a gain of just 151 students (0.3%), its smallest annual increase in the dataset. The remaining five gainers added a combined 417 students.

Three forces converging

No single cause explains losses this widespread. Reporting and district statements point to at least three concurrent pressures.

The first is demographic. Florida's kindergarten class has been shrinking for three consecutive years, from 197,925 in 2023 to 179,414 in 2026, a 9.4% drop. The state's birth rate has fallen steadily from 12.3 per 1,000 residents in 2002, and deaths have outnumbered births since 2020. Kindergarten contractions feed forward: smaller entering classes each year compound into declining totals.

The second is migration. Net domestic migration to Florida has collapsed by more than 90% since 2022. Higher home prices, rising insurance costs, and hurricane risk have dropped the state from the nation's top domestic migration destination during the pandemic to eighth place. Lee Bryant, president of the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association, told WUSF the housing dynamic is straightforward:

"It's so expensive to live in Pinellas County that families, or people who would have a family, don't want to live here." — WUSF, Sept. 2025

The third is the state's universal voucher program, which eliminated income requirements in 2023. The program has grown rapidly, though its direct enrollment effect is debated: most new voucher recipients were already in private school. In Miami-Dade, charter and private school competition accounted for only about 1,000 of 13,000 lost students, suggesting vouchers are not the primary driver in every district. Different districts appear to face different mixes of these three forces.

The longest streaks

Some districts have been declining for years, well before the current acceleration. Pinellas^↗, down 4,234 students (4.8%) in 2026, has now lost enrollment in 11 consecutive years, the longest active streak in the state. Since 2015, Pinellas has gone from 103,754 students to 83,560, a loss of 20,194 students, or 19.5%. The Pinellas County School Board voted in February 2026 to close Cross Bayou Elementary and Disston Academy.

Broward is in its eighth consecutive year of decline, falling from a peak of 271,951 in 2018 to 236,260, a loss of 35,691 students (13.1%). Leon, home to Tallahassee, is also in an eight-year streak.

The indexed trajectories of the five largest districts reveal a divergence that began in 2020. Miami-Dade and Broward never recovered from their COVID losses. Hillsborough temporarily regained its 2017 level by 2023, only to plunge 5.0% below it by 2026. Orange and Palm Beach held closer to their baselines through 2024 before accelerating downward.

32 districts at record lows

Nearly half of Florida's regular districts, 32 of 67 (47.8%), recorded their lowest enrollment in the available 12-year dataset (2015-2026) in 2026. Some of these districts may have had lower enrollment before 2015, but the trend direction is unambiguous. The list includes three of the five largest districts: Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach. It includes Panhandle districts (Escambia, Leon, Jackson), Central Florida districts (Seminole, Volusia, Alachua), and rural districts across the state (Putnam, Columbia, Highlands, Okeechobee).

All-time lows aren't just statistical footnotes. Per-pupil funding follows students in Florida's education finance system. Broward's loss of roughly 10,000 students translated to a $94 million budget shortfall, forcing a hiring freeze, school closures, and programming cuts that are difficult to reverse if students return. Orange County estimated its loss of 5,539 students cost $41 million.

What to watch

The kindergarten pipeline is the leading indicator. Florida's 2026 kindergarten class of 179,414 is 12.1% below the 2015 level of 204,090, and the 2026 decline of 11,380 kindergartners was the largest single-year drop outside the pandemic. Those smaller cohorts will take 12 years to fully flow through the system.

Whether 88.1% is a ceiling or a waypoint depends on what happens next. During COVID, the breadth peaked at 92.5% and snapped back within a year. The current decline has no comparable mechanism for reversal: birth rates are still falling, housing costs are still rising, and the voucher program is still expanding. If 2027 pushes the figure above 90%, Florida will have entered territory that COVID occupied for one year and the current forces show no sign of vacating.

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