Enrollment at Chicago Public Schools has continued its steady decline this year, dropping by more than 6,000 students this fall, officials announced Friday.
An official count taken Sept. 30, the 20th day of school, revealed 355,156 students in the country’s third largest school system — a 1.7% drop from the 361,314 kids in the system last year. The count was taken more than a month before the data was released.
The decline was slightly smaller than years past, when there was about a 10,000-student drop each of the previous three years. Enrollment stood at 371,382 in 2017 and 381,349 in 2016.
The number of students has been falling for the past eight years and is down a whopping 47,500 kids from 402,681 in June 2011 — just after former Mayor Rahm Emanuel first took office.
CPS remains the country’s third largest school system but only a tight margin separates it from the fourth largest, Miami-Dade County Public Schools in Florida, which is also shrinking. As of April, Miami-Dade’s pre-K-12 enrollment measured 350,040.
Despite the overall drop, the number of students at CPS-run high schools remained about the same this year. But there was a 2.1% decline in charter enrollment with 1,154 fewer charter school students than last year, down from 54,569 to 53,415. The year before, charters lost half as many kids.
The biggest drop came at district-run elementary schools, which saw enrollment go down 2.3%, or 4,793 kids, from 207,032 to 202,239 — an alarming trend for the district as fewer families start their young children in the system.
The district hopes that could be offset by a rise in pre-K students spurred by a new universal pre-K program started by Emanuel.
“With our plan to provide free full-day pre-k to all communities in Chicago, the district is providing critical educational opportunities for young learners across the city while laying the foundation for a strengthened student pipeline,” CPS Chief Education Officer LaTanya McDade said in a news release.
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