On July 30, 2026, while guest hosting Mundo in the Morning on KCMO Talk Radio, Patrick Tuohey, senior fellow at the Show-Me Institute, spoke with Susan Pendergrass, the Institute’s Director of Research, about declining school enrollment in Missouri. Pendergrass walks through the demographic data behind the decline, why it isn’t a pandemic-related blip, and what it means for school funding, staffing, and building use going forward.

Listen to more from KCMO Talk Radio here.

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This shift will ripple through many of our institutions that depend on population growth. Social Security is an obvious example. But there’s a broader problem: modern institutions are built for expansion, not contraction. Enter our public school system, which is already experiencing declining enrollment. Statewide, enrollment in Missouri public schools is down 4 percent since the pre-recession peak in 2007–08, a trend recent fertility data suggest will only accelerate. On top of this, traditional public schools must contend with the reality that families are increasingly choosing alternative schooling options (e.g., charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling).

Are we prepared to address declining enrollment in Missouri’s traditional public schools? My gut tells me no, and there are some worrisome indicators. For example, many Missouri school districts already have declining enrollment, in some cases stretching back decades. What are we doing about this? At the state level, one thing we aren’t doing is adjusting their funding to reflect fewer students. Missouri’s “hold harmless” provision allows districts with shrinking enrollment to continue receiving funds as if their enrollment hasn’t fallen. In effect, the state is subsidizing higher per-student spending in these districts (this is also happening elsewhere).

This bury-our-heads-in-the-sand approach is manageable for now, but as more districts fall into the declining-enrollment category, it will be harder to keep overfunding them; education is one of many state priorities and our budget must balance.

More broadly, I worry school districts will be slow to close buildings, reduce staff, and otherwise cut costs in response to declining enrollment. These steps are painful and politically difficult, but delaying them only narrows future options. Ideally, districts—guided by the state—would use realistic enrollment projections to plan ahead. With proactive leadership, we could adapt to a new era of declining enrollment while minimizing harm to students. But if district and state leaders wait until acute financial pressure forces their hand, the cuts will likely be deeper and more disruptive.

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The size of Missouri’s kindergarten classes is getting smaller. The birth rate peaked in the state in 2008. Five years later, kindergarten enrollment in the state peaked at nearly 72,000 children. Since then it has steadily declined and total kindergarten enrollment is down by 10,000 students. The chart below illustrates the decline:

Missouri Public Schools Kindergarten Enrollment

It doesn’t take a demographer to see where total enrollment is going. Ultimately, every public school grade will be down by at least 10,000 students—which is a total of 130,000 from peak enrollment in the state.

There will no doubt be handwringing about teacher layoffs, school closings, and consolidation. But anyone who had been paying attention could have planned for this.  We’ve had a decade to adjust our perspective.

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Let’s look at this with a clear head. The chart below shows Missouri state and federal revenue for public education, adjusted for inflation, from before the pandemic through the recently approved budget for the 2024–25 school year. In 2017–18, there were just under 920,000 students in pre-K through 12th grade in Missouri and the state legislature appropriated a total of $5.8 million (2023 dollars) from the general revenue fund and other state funds. The federal government kicked in another $1.3 million, largely for the Title I program for low-income students, the IDEA program for students with disabilities, and the school lunch program. Last year, even after the recovery from the pandemic enrollment drops, we had about 25,000 fewer students—a trend that is expected to continue. Yet, the legislature’s appropriation was about $500 million more than seven years ago.

The cliff is in that green hump at the top of the graph. Like a hike in the mountains, if you do a lot of climbing, you’re going to have to descend at some point to get back to your car.

So, is it obvious that we need a special session to get a “mother of all supplemental budgets” for education? Only if you believe that spending can only ever go up. Missouri, like many states, has a persistent trend of declining enrollment. Is it reasonable to think that we can only ever consider level or increased spending on public education?

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COVID-19 appeared to accelerate this student loss, as Missouri saw a decline in enrollment of 20,000 students in the fall of 2020. When enrollment rebounded slightly the following year, it was fair to wonder if Missouri could eventually regain the 20,000 who had left. However, according to recent enrollment data from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), enrollment is trending downward once again.

Below is a graph that maps Missouri’s K-12 public school enrollment since fall 2011 (the 2011–2012 school year):

Source: Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE)

*Fall 2023 has a dashed line because the enrollment figure is preliminary and not final. *

It’s possible that the students we lost during the pandemic simply aren’t “coming back,” as Missouri enrollment resumed its pre-pandemic decline in both of the past two years. With this in mind, we need to evaluate policy options in light of a shrinking student body.

As I have discussed before, the general trend of declining student enrollment and rising teacher employment reveals that the proclaimed “teacher shortage” is due to specific deficiencies in the teacher pipeline—not a growing student body.

School districts also need to evaluate which classes and services they can provide to their student body. As I discussed recently, declining enrollment and participation led to Brentwood being unable to field a football team. As a result, the district merged its football team with Clayton, which led to a solid playoff run.

These kinds of policies will be needed as enrollment continues to decline. Districts may need to share classes with each other. Some districts may need to go a step further and pool their resources. There are many costs associated with meeting federal and state regulations in a school district, and merging two shrinking districts into one could increase the amount of funding devoted to instructing students.

The K-12 enrollment decline isn’t what we want, but it appears to be what we’re getting. Policymakers at the state and district levels need to plan accordingly.

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Missouri Elementary and Secondary Enrollment and Teachers: 2014–15 through 2021–22

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Common Core of Data, Nonfiscal Survey, multiple years, nces.ed.gov/ccd

Missouri enrollment fell from 920,000 students in 2015 to 910,000 in 2019—before the pandemic. Even with the post-pandemic recovery, enrollment is still down over 30,000 students from six years ago. Interestingly, we now have over 3,000 more teachers to serve the smaller student body.

According to Dr. Marguerite Roza of Georgetown University, there have been three waves contributing to the growing teaching staff. The first was the post-recession hiring back of laid off teachers. Then there were seven boom years of growth in education funding (though not in enrollment). Finally, there has been the enormous influx of pandemic stimulus funds from the federal government.

Stimulus money is drying up, though. So, what happens next? The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has just submitted a budget request that has a $300 million increase. In a logic-defying move, DESE claims that fewer students means we need a higher dollar amount per student in the foundation formula. Why? Because hiring when enrollment goes down because you’ve got the money doesn’t mean you can simply fire excess teachers when the funds dry up. Public education employment contracts don’t work that way. The system needs total funding to stay the same or increase, regardless of enrollment trends. Here’s hoping the state legislature looks at the math before agreeing to this request for no accountability.

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Sure, enrollment in many of our already small rural districts has declined so much that it raises the question of how the districts can continue to exist. But that’s not the whole story. Some of the “best” districts in St. Louis County have been experiencing steady enrollment declines. In 2017–18, the Clayton School District had almost 2,800 students. Last year, it had fewer than 2,400. A loss of four hundred students in a district of that size is significant. Similarly, Parkway C-2 has lost 1,000 students in the past few years, going from nearly 18,000 students in 2018–19 to fewer than 17,000. Rockwood, which had nearly 23,000 students a decade ago, now has just under 21,000, having lost 1,900 students from its high-water mark.

In fact, every district other than Ladue and Lindbergh has seen enrollment losses since 2010. But their gains of approximately 2,300 students don’t come close to offsetting the countywide loss of over 11,000. St. Louis County’s neighbor, St. Charles County, shows similar trends. The biggest districts are down by thousands of students.

So what does this mean? Even with no boundary changes, we will have excess capacity and too many teachers in most districts unless we make the region and the state more attractive to families. Districts can no longer rest on their laurels and assume their classrooms will be filled. Programs that allow parents to choose a school for each of their children and that allow districts to specialize in what they offer should be welcomed. Those hard district lines meant to keep students out may need to become more porous.

Public education in Missouri is no longer a system of more—more students, more teachers, more school buildings, more money. It’s a shrinking system, and that will bring difficult decisions. It’s time to start thinking about how we can design a smarter system to better serve our region.

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One glaring problem I see in the report is a complete lack of thought to almost anything besides compensation. Don’t get me wrong, compensation matters, and the commission is absolutely right to consider compensation. But if you are going to examine why there are reported teacher shortages, you ought to do a better job looking for causes or kinks in the teacher pipeline. Simply surveying existing teachers about whether they’d like more money (they would) will not help us answer the most pressing questions.

What are the causes of our current teacher shortage? They are certainly varied. But one thing the commission never seemed to consider was the current hiring practices of school districts.

From 2011 to 2021, enrollment in Missouri public schools dropped by nearly 30,000 students. The largest drop was post-COVID, with the state losing over 20,000 students in that year alone. Nevertheless, the trend is clearly downward.

It would make sense, given that total enrollment in the state has been decreasing, to see a similar decline in the number of teachers. Fewer students, fewer teachers needed. But instead, we see the opposite happening. As enrollment drops, the state continues to add to the number of teachers. In the table below, I present the number of full-time equivalent teachers (FTE). From 2011 to 2021—the same period that the state lost 30,000 students—the state added 2,475 FTE teachers. As the state dropped 20,000 students from the rolls, it only lost 10 FTE teachers. This brings the ratio down from 13.2 students per FTE teacher in 2011 to 12.3 in 2021.

If we looked at non-teaching staff and administration, we’d likely see similar trends. Indeed, Economist Ben Scafidi found exactly this when he looked at the data from 1992 to 2015. During that time period, Missouri student enrollment increased 9% while teachers increased 28% and all other staff increased 24%. Hiring seems to be uncorrelated with trends in student enrollment.

Why didn’t the commission consider this? Why wasn’t someone willing to ask the question, “Why are we increasing the number of teachers when the number of students is dropping?”

If you want to understand the teacher shortage, this is pretty important information.

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But a new analysis by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NACPS)  argues that not all schools saw drops in enrollment. In fact, across the country and in Missouri, charter schools actually saw increases in attendance.

The report’s authors worked with state data (and state education agencies) to examine enrollment trends in both traditional public and public charter schools. For the nation, they found a 3.3 percent decline from 2019–20 to 2020–21 in enrollment in traditional public schools, a similar trend to what the federal government’s data wonks found. But for charter schools, they found a 7.08 percent increase during that time period, representing some 237,311 students newly enrolled in charter schools.

In Missouri, while only finding a 0.1 percent decrease in enrollment in traditional public schools, the authors found a 3.5 percent increase in charter school enrollment.

Now, caveats are in order. Data on school enrollment is fluid right now. Sources conflict (as we see in the differences between what the feds counted in Missouri and what NAPCS did). Online learning, in both the traditional public and charter sectors, messes with the numbers as students move between modalities. I will be much more confident with another year of data.

That said, what NAPCS reported does align with a lot of what we’re hearing anecdotally. Lots of families were frustrated during the pandemic and were looking for other options. Charter schools are one of them. Especially in places where charter schools found ways to either be open in person or to provide a quality virtual option while their neighboring traditional public schools did neither, charter schools were an attractive option. We shouldn’t be surprised if families took advantage of it.

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Like most urban school districts, Saint Louis and Kansas City have had declining enrollment for decades. They are also facing stiff competition from charter schools, which enroll 29 and 42 percent of all public school students in each respective city. This has left each district with more than 30 vacant school buildings. Vacant buildings are a problem for the district and the community. The cost of maintenance can be a drain on resources, diverting dollars away from the classroom. The buildings can also become an eyesore for the community, inviting vagrants and illegal activity.

In my latest paper, “Vacant School Buildings: An Examination of Kansas City and Saint Louis,” former Show-Me Institute intern Abigail Fallon and I explore this complex issue. Unlike most areas of education, little research exists on vacant school buildings, and few claim to know how to handle these properties. While there may not be a definitive answer on what should be done, we argue that school districts should be more intentional about divesting these buildings or putting them back to productive use. To that end, we offer some possible solutions, namely, that these buildings should be made available for lease or sold to charter schools.

The bottom line is that school districts must become more diligent in dealing with this problem.

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