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Alabama school enrollment decline complicated by lack of tracking, say experts

Students walk through the hallways of Livingston Jr. High School in Livingston, Ala. Alabama saw an enrollment decline last year, and critics say a law last updated in 2014 makes it difficult to track children who leave the public school system. (Will McLelland/Alabama Reflector file)
Students walk through the hallways of Livingston Jr. High School in Livingston, Ala. Alabama saw an enrollment decline last year, and critics say a law last updated in 2014 makes it difficult to track children who leave the public school system. (Will McLelland/Alabama Reflector file) Students walk through the hallways of Livingston Jr. High School in Livingston, Ala. Alabama saw an enrollment decline last year, and critics say a law last updated in 2014 makes it difficult to track children who leave the public school system. (Will McLelland/Alabama Reflector file)

By Andrea Tinker 6 min read

When Alabama public schools saw the largest drop in enrollment in four decades last year, there was some concern.

Data from the Alabama State Department of Education showed that over 5,800 students were not enrolled in public school. Of those students, around 3,000 students received Choose Act funds that can be used for private school enrollment. Roughly 2,100 were unaccounted for.

Alabama Education Association Executive Director Amy Marlowe said in a recent interview she was alarmed by the numbers when she first saw them, but after doing research, she said the decline wasn’t out of the ordinary.

“We’ve had demographers, the people who study demographics, who have been telling us for a while that the school-age population was going to drop just because of the shift in birth rates in the state, so some of that we were expecting, and then when you couple that with the Choose Act and the way that it was evenly distributed throughout the state,” she said.

While the decline is in line with national trends, determining who leaves Alabama public schools is difficult because of a law last updated in 2014 that experts say makes it difficult to track attendance in private schools. Under the law, parents of students who attend non-public schools, including private, parochial and church schools, must report when their child is enrolled in a private school or when they leave. But critics say this rule is not enforced.