Saint Paul - EdTribune MN - Minnesota Education Data

Five Years Later, Minnesota Is Still at the COVID Floor

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Minnesota 2025-26 Enrollment.

Minnesota was a growth state. From 2010 to 2020, enrollment rose every single year, climbing from 836,557 to 893,203, a gain of 56,646 over 10 consecutive years. Then COVID arrived, 21,120 students vanished in a single year, and the state never got them back.

Five years after the pandemic trough, Minnesota's K-12 enrollment stands at 873,175. Of the 21,120 students lost between 2020 and 2021, exactly 1,092 have returned, a 5.2% recovery rate. Had the pre-2020 growth trend continued, averaging roughly 4,050 students per year, the state would be approaching 917,500 students. Instead, 44,322 students are missing from where the trendline projected they would be.

The false signal of 2025

The 2025 school year briefly suggested recovery was possible. Enrollment jumped by 6,779 students, the largest single-year gain since before the pandemic. But 2026 erased more than half of it, dropping 3,571 students. The bounce was a mirage.

What makes the pattern unusual is how stable the floor has been. From 2021 through 2024, enrollment varied by less than 2,200 students total, hovering between 869,967 and 872,083. The state did not slowly decline or gradually recover. It dropped to a new level and stayed there, as if a thermostat had been reset.

Where the students went

The statewide 5.2% recovery figure obscures a sharper divide. Traditional public school districts have not recovered at all. They enrolled 830,452 students in 2020 and 800,405 in 2026, a net loss of 30,047. Charter schools, meanwhile, grew from 62,751 to 72,770 over the same period, adding 10,019 students, a 16% gain.

Indexed to 2020 enrollment levels, traditional districts sit at 96.4 while charters have climbed to 116. The two sectors are moving in opposite directions.

Of the 280 districts that lost students during COVID, only 74, or 26.4%, have returned to their 2020 enrollment level. The remaining 206 are still below their pre-pandemic peak. The pattern is consistent: larger districts recover less.

Minneapolis^↗ has lost 4,533 students since 2020, a 13.1% decline that has pushed the district to 30,079 students. Saint Paul^↗ dropped from 36,004 to 32,750, a loss of 3,254 (9.0%). Robbinsdale^↗, a first-ring suburb, has lost 16.6%. Not a single large district in the state, defined as 8,000 or more students in 2020, has returned to pre-pandemic enrollment.

The exceptions are mostly affluent western suburbs. Wayzata^↗ has surged past its 2020 level by 1,010 students. Eden Prairie^↗ gained 855. These gains likely reflect families sorting into high-performing suburban systems rather than net new students entering the state's schools.

The pipeline problem underneath

The COVID plateau is not just about families who left and did not return. The incoming pipeline has structurally narrowed. Minnesota's kindergarten enrollment has fallen from 65,423 in 2020 to 56,993 in 2026, a decline of 12.9%. Meanwhile, 12th-grade enrollment has risen from 71,302 to 76,674. Each year, more students leave the top of the system than enter at the bottom.

The state demographer's office has connected this directly to falling birth rates. Minnesota had approximately 3,000 fewer school-age children in 2021 than in 2020, and projections suggest roughly 10,000 fewer kindergarteners will enter schools in 2026 than did in 2021. U.S. birth rates have declined annually since 2015, and Minnesota has not been exempt.

This means the COVID floor is not a temporary resting point. Even if every family that left traditional public schools returned, the incoming cohorts are too small to restore growth. A state that added students for 10 consecutive years now loses them structurally, independent of any pandemic effect.

Funding pressure without fiscal collapse

Minnesota's general education funding formula allocates $7,481 per pupil for fiscal year 2026. The 44,322-student gap between where enrollment is and where pre-COVID trends projected it would be represents roughly $332 million in formula revenue that the system will never see.

That figure overstates the immediate pain. Minnesota provides declining enrollment revenue, a mechanism that gives districts 28% of the basic formula allowance for each student lost in a given year, cushioning the transition. The Minnesota Department of Education forecasts declining pupil revenue at $18.5 million statewide, rising to $31 million in fiscal year 2027.

The real fiscal pressure hits unevenly. Minneapolis projects a budget shortfall that has grown from $30 million to approximately $75 million, driven largely by enrollment loss. The district has capacity for 42,000 students but enrolls 30,079. St. Paul passed a $37 million levy but still projects a $15 million shortfall for 2026-27. Anoka-Hennepin^↗, the state's largest district, faces a $24 million gap.

The building problem

Where the 30,000 students who left traditional districts went is not entirely a mystery. Charter schools absorbed 10,019. Private schools and homeschooling saw increases of 1% and 10%, respectively. State demographic projections forecast the student population declining roughly 5% over the next 15 years. And some of the missing, the children who were never born, simply do not exist to enroll.

For district leaders, the operational reality is physical: too many buildings for too few students. Minneapolis has capacity for 42,000 students and enrolls 30,079. The school board has begun discussing what a smaller district looks like. Farmington^↗, which lost 15.1% of its enrollment since 2020, and Robbinsdale^↗, which lost 16.6%, face similar arithmetic. Every half-empty building carries the same heating bill, the same roof maintenance, the same fixed costs spread across fewer students.

The 2027 kindergarten cohort will be drawn from children born in 2021 and 2022, the lowest birth years in recent Minnesota history. The COVID floor was not a temporary resting point that the 2025 bounce interrupted. It was the first landing on a staircase that leads down.

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

Minnesota's Hispanic Enrollment Drops for the First Time in 18 Years

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Minnesota 2025-26 Enrollment.

For 18 consecutive years, Hispanic enrollment in Minnesota moved in one direction. From 48,269 students in 2006-07 to 101,440 in 2024-25, the growth never paused, not even during the pandemic. No other demographic group in the state came close to that streak.

In 2025-26, it ended. Hispanic enrollment fell by 137 students to 101,303, a decline of 0.1%. The number is small. The signal is not.

The arithmetic of a plateau

The raw decline of 137 students is barely a rounding error in a state enrolling 873,175 children. But context matters: Hispanic students had been adding an average of 2,800 per year over the prior decade. They more than doubled from 48,269 to 101,440 between 2007 and 2025, a gain of 110.2%. Their share of total enrollment climbed from 5.7% to 11.6% over the same period.

That growth had already been uneven. The year-over-year pattern shows a volatile trajectory: gains of just 270 in 2020-21 and 201 in 2022-23 sandwiched between years adding 3,000 or more. Then came two unusually large jumps, 4,253 in 2023-24 and 5,385 in 2024-25, before the reversal.

The 2014 spike of 8,158 deserves scrutiny. That anomalous one-year jump, triple the typical annual gain, likely reflects a reclassification or reporting change rather than an actual surge in arrivals. Growth before and after 2014 was remarkably steady at 2,000 to 3,300 per year.

Not a Hispanic story alone

Hispanic students are not the only group losing ground. White enrollment fell by 9,201 in 2025-26, continuing a long structural decline that has erased 130,507 white students since 2007, a drop of 20.1%. What makes the Hispanic decline distinctive is that it breaks a pattern no other group matched. Black enrollment rose by 3,933. Multiracial students grew by 1,007. Native American enrollment increased by 528, and Asian by 189. Hispanic students were the only previously growing group to reverse direction.

A single year does not make a trend. But it does break one.

Operation Metro Surge and the attendance collapse

The timing of the decline coincides with a period of unprecedented disruption for immigrant communities in Minnesota. Beginning in December 2025, the federal government deployed more than 3,000 immigration agents to the Twin Cities metro area in what officials called "Operation Metro Surge." The operation's effects on school attendance were immediate and severe.

On January 9, 2026, two days after an ICE officer fatally shot 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good during a federal enforcement operation in Minneapolis, 51% of students whose home language is Spanish did not show up to school in St. Paul. Absences in the district spiked to 30% in mid-January, up from typical levels. About 7,000 of St. Paul's roughly 33,260 students signed up for a temporary virtual learning option the district launched on January 22.

"We are watching a generation of St. Paul children, and children across this entire country, lose their childhoods to a fear that no child should know." -- Amy Hewett-Olatunde, ESL teacher, St. Paul Public Schools

The virtual program cost St. Paul approximately $905,000 and ended in mid-March 2026. District officials acknowledged it came at an academic cost. "It did not offer the academic rigor that we want to provide to all students," Kathy Kimani, St. Paul's director of school support, told MPR News. "So with seven weeks, there will be some learning loss and gaps."

The enrollment data predates the worst of Operation Metro Surge. Minnesota's official enrollment counts are taken in early October, months before the December 2025 deployment. The -137 decline reflects conditions as of fall 2025. If the attendance disruptions of January and February 2026 translate into permanent departures, those losses would appear in next year's numbers.

Where the losses concentrated

Minneapolis^↗ lost the most Hispanic students of any district, dropping 262, from 6,874 to 6,612, a 3.8% decline. Saint Paul^↗ lost 225, falling from 4,988 to 4,763, a 4.5% decline. Together the Twin Cities' two largest districts accounted for 487 of the statewide decline, meaning the rest of the state actually gained 350 Hispanic students on net.

Columbia Heights^↗, a small inner-ring suburb, lost 97 Hispanic students, a 5.2% drop from 1,851 to 1,754. The district's superintendent told state lawmakers that enrollment had dropped by 130 students overall, costing nearly $2 million in lost funding. Seven students were detained by federal agents, six of whom were flown to Texas, with two spending over a month in custody.

The geographic pattern is striking. Metro-area districts lost a combined 566 Hispanic students, a 1.0% decline. Greater Minnesota districts gained 540, a 1.2% increase. The decline is almost entirely a Twin Cities phenomenon.

Worthington^↗, a meatpacking town in southwestern Minnesota where a majority of public school students are Hispanic, lost 56 Hispanic students, falling from 2,293 to 2,237. But St. Cloud gained 46, Long Prairie-Grey Eagle gained 46, and Eden Prairie gained 84. The outstate pattern suggests that Hispanic families continue arriving in Greater Minnesota's processing and agricultural centers even as metro enrollment softens.

Competing explanations

Immigration enforcement is the most visible explanation, but it is not the only one. Three forces are plausible.

The enforcement chill is the mechanism with the most direct evidence in Minnesota. Fridley superintendent Brenda Lewis described six ICE vehicles circling a roundabout in front of Hayes Elementary School, preventing children from crossing. Some families are self-deporting. The Minnesota Association of Charter Schools reported that some schools saw attendance drops of 40% or more, with Partnership Academy in Richfield hitting a low of 39% attendance. But the enrollment count was taken in October 2025, before the most intense enforcement. The enforcement hypothesis better explains what may come next than what happened this year.

A second possibility is demographic maturation. Hispanic fertility rates nationally have declined significantly since the Great Recession, and Minnesota's Hispanic population has followed the same pattern. The state's Hispanic population skews young, but falling birth rates mean smaller entering kindergarten cohorts. If the Hispanic population's age structure is normalizing, growth would slow regardless of immigration policy.

A third factor is the composition of recent arrivals. The large gains in 2024 and 2025, 4,253 and 5,385 respectively, were unusually high. They may have included a surge of unaccompanied minors and families who have since moved on to other states, aged out of K-12, or whose placement was temporary. A partial reversal after two outsized years would be mechanical, not structural.

The most likely answer involves all three. The data cannot distinguish between a student who left because their family was deported, a student who was never born, and a student who aged out.

What the share plateau means

Hispanic students now represent 11.6% of Minnesota's public school enrollment, up from 5.7% in 2007. That share barely budged from 2025 to 2026, ticking up by 0.03 percentage points only because total enrollment fell faster than Hispanic enrollment.

The share plateau matters because Hispanic growth has been the primary demographic counterweight to white decline. White enrollment has fallen by 130,507 students since 2007. Hispanic enrollment grew by 53,034 over the same period, offsetting about 41% of the white loss. If Hispanic growth stalls, the math of Minnesota's enrollment decline changes. The burden of offsetting white attrition shifts entirely to Black students (up 3,933 in 2026) and multiracial students (up 1,007), neither of which are growing fast enough to close the gap.

Under Minnesota's school funding formula, which is calculated in part on average daily attendance, districts serving large Hispanic populations face a compounding problem. Enrollment declines reduce per-pupil aid. Attendance disruptions from immigration enforcement further reduce the daily count on which funding is calculated. Students absent for 15 consecutive days are disenrolled under state law.

The next enrollment count, taken in October 2026, will capture whether the spring's attendance disruptions translated into permanent losses. If they did, the 137-student decline will look like a precursor, not an anomaly.

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