(The Center Square) – Kindergarten through 12th grade enrollment in North Carolina is down 0.3% for the period 2019 to 2024, the National Center for Education Statistics says,
For the 2014-24 period, it’s up 0.4%.
The state is home to 90,000 educators and about 1.5 million schoolchildren in its 11.2 million population. In passage of the last two-year budget in 2023, the state became the 10th to implement universal school choice.
A year later in November 2024, the Legislature appropriated $463 million to the Opportunity Scholarship program to wipe out a waiting list of about 55,000.
The 2026 Appropriations Act, known also as Senate Bill 257 and signed by first-term Democratic Gov. Josh Stein earlier this month, has average raises of 8% for teachers. Those with 16 or more years of experience will get bonuses of $1,000, those with less get $500.
Budget writers have appropriated $12.5 billion to the Department of Public Instruction, and $35.8 million to the deaf and blind residential schools.
Nationally, only 10 states had enrollment remain flat or increase between 2019 and 2024. Two of those – Texas and Florida – are states that in recent years have trended top three with North Carolina for domestic migration. The others were North Dakota, Delaware, Idaho, South Carolina, Alabama, South Dakota, Nebraska and Utah.
Nationwide decreases of this magnitude haven’t happened in about half a century, when births per 1,000 women fell from 123 to 65. Writing for the Reason Foundation, senior policy analyst Jude Schwalbach writes this decline is also attached to a birth rate dropping 6.8% in comparison from 2014 to 2019.
North Carolina’s population has grown by 756,000 over the last five years, says U.S. Census Bureau numbers released in January. It was 10.4 million in 2019 and 11 million in 2024.
