EdTribune MN - Minnesota Education Data

One in Five: Minnesota Nears a Special Education Threshold

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Minnesota 2025-26 Enrollment.

In 2014, roughly one in seven Minnesota students received special education services. In 2026, it is closer to one in five. The share has grown every year except 2021, when COVID disrupted identification processes statewide, and the pace has accelerated since.

The raw number, 168,525 students, is striking enough. What makes it structurally significant is what happened around it: total enrollment barely moved. Minnesota enrolled 850,871 students in 2014 and 873,175 in 2026, a gain of 2.6%. Special education enrollment grew 33.8% over the same period, adding 42,618 students. The students receiving specialized instruction are not arriving from outside the system. They were already there.

The climb toward 20%

Minnesota's special education rate rose from 14.8% in 2014 to 19.3% in 2026, an increase of 4.5 percentage points over 12 years. At the current pace of roughly 0.38 percentage points per year, the state is on track to cross 20% by 2028.

The growth has not been steady. Before the pandemic, special education enrollment climbed by 3,000 to 4,500 students per year. COVID disrupted that pattern: the state lost 3,420 special education students in 2021 as schools struggled to conduct evaluations and maintain services remotely. Then came the rebound. Between 2022 and 2024, Minnesota added 16,076 special education students in just three years, peaking at 7,517 new identifications in 2024 alone, the largest single-year gain in the dataset.

The 2025 and 2026 numbers, while still positive at 5,667 and 3,520 respectively, suggest the post-COVID identification backlog may be clearing. Whether the rate settles or continues climbing will shape the state's fiscal outlook for years.

What is driving the surge

The most likely explanation is expanded identification, not a sudden increase in disability prevalence. Three mechanisms are operating simultaneously.

First, diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder have broadened nationally. The CDC reported in April 2025 that 1 in 31 eight-year-olds now meets the autism identification threshold, and children born in 2018 were 1.7 times more likely to be diagnosed by age four than those born four years earlier. In Minnesota specifically, 1 in 34 children are diagnosed with autism. The Autism Society of America has emphasized that this reflects better identification, not a growing epidemic.

Second, COVID created a backlog. Evaluations stalled during remote learning, and referrals accumulated. When schools returned to in-person instruction, the evaluation pipeline surged, producing the 2023 and 2024 spikes visible in the data.

Third, parent awareness has increased. KAXE reported in September 2025 that approximately 150,000 Minnesota K-12 students now receive special education services, and attributed rising demand partly to greater awareness of neurological disorders.

A competing explanation, that Minnesota's schools are genuinely seeing more students with disabilities, cannot be ruled out entirely. But the consistency of the trend across states and the timing of the post-COVID acceleration both point toward identification-driven growth rather than prevalence-driven growth.

A widening gap between two enrollment lines

Indexing both series to 2014 reveals the structural divergence. By 2026, special education enrollment stands at 133.8 on the index while total enrollment sits at 102.6. The gap began opening around 2017 and widened sharply after the pandemic.

The practical consequence: non-special-education enrollment actually fell by 20,314 students between 2014 and 2026, even as total enrollment grew slightly. For every 100 students in general education, there are now 23.9 students receiving special education services, up from 17.4 in 2014. That ratio determines staffing models, classroom composition, and the size of the unfunded gap districts must cover from general revenue.

The cross-subsidy: Minnesota's billion-dollar structural problem

Special education services carry higher per-pupil instructional costs than general education. Federal law requires districts to provide these services regardless of funding levels. The gap between what districts spend on special education and what they receive from state and federal sources is called the cross-subsidy, and in Minnesota, it has been one of the largest unfunded mandates in K-12 education.

The Minnesota Department of Education projected the statewide cross-subsidy at $750 million for fiscal year 2024. Rep. Dan Wolgamott (DFL-St. Cloud) characterized the existing system as "robbing Peter to pay Paul," describing how special education shortfalls force districts to redirect general education resources.

"This is the right thing to do. These services are critical to our students with special needs to help them reach their fullest potential." — Rep. Dan Wolgamott, Minnesota House Session Daily

The legislature responded with the most significant special education funding increase in state history. The 2023 education law raised state coverage of the cross-subsidy from 6.43% to 44% for fiscal years 2024-2026, with a further increase to 50% beginning in fiscal year 2027. The law allocated $663 million in increased funding for the 2024-25 biennium.

But even 44% coverage leaves districts responsible for the majority of unreimbursed costs. And the denominator keeps growing: as the special education population expands, so does the total cost. The 2025 K-12 education bill directed a Blue Ribbon Commission to find $250 million in special education cost reductions by the 2026 legislative session and cut special education transportation reimbursement to 95% in fiscal year 2026 and 90% thereafter, a reduction of $43.2 million over two years.

Where the burden falls unevenly

Special education rates vary enormously across Minnesota's 535 districts. Excluding intermediate school districts, which are special education cooperatives by design, rates in 2026 range from 2.1% at Higher Ground Academy^↗, a charter school in St. Paul, to 31.2% at Cass Lake-Bena^↗ in northern Minnesota.

Among districts with at least 500 students, 126 have already crossed the 20% threshold. Rural districts dominate the high end: Deer River^↗ at 30.6%, Onamia^↗ at 29.8%, and Greenway^↗ at 29.5%. At those rates, nearly one in three students is entitled to an individualized education program.

The charter sector tells a different story. Charter schools collectively serve students at a 15.8% special education rate, compared to 19.6% for traditional districts, a 3.8 percentage-point gap. Both rates have grown since 2014, when charters stood at 12.4% and traditional districts at 14.9%, but the gap has persisted. Several charter schools sit below 7%: STEP Academy (6.0%), New Century School (6.0%), and Metro Schools Charter (4.5%). Whether this reflects enrollment patterns, mission-specific populations, or differential identification practices is a question Minnesota has not systematically answered.

Large districts feel it most in the budget

Among the state's largest districts, St. Cloud^↗ carries the highest special education rate at 24.9%, up from 20.0% in 2014. Duluth^↗ stands at 24.8%, up 8.0 percentage points over the period. Cambridge-Isanti^↗ and Buffalo-Hanover-Montrose^↗ each saw their rates jump by 9.6 percentage points, the largest increases among large districts, reaching 22.5% and 23.4% respectively.

Minneapolis^↗ is the notable outlier. Its special education rate rose only 0.9 percentage points, from 18.2% to 19.1%, the smallest increase among the state's 40 largest districts. Minneapolis is also the only large district where the absolute number of special education students declined, from 6,588 to 5,742, a drop that tracks with the district's overall enrollment losses.

Anoka-Hennepin^↗, the state's largest district, crossed 20% in 2026, reaching 20.3% with 7,797 students receiving services, up from 5,658 in 2014.

The 20% horizon

The 20% threshold is symbolic, but it carries real weight. It means a school of 500 students has roughly 100 IEPs to staff, fund, and comply with. It means one in five families navigating the special education process. And it means general education budgets absorbing an ever-larger share of costs that state and federal funding does not cover.

The Blue Ribbon Commission's work, due by the 2026 session, will determine whether Minnesota attempts to slow the growth in costs or simply funds the system at its current trajectory. The distinction matters: "cost control" in special education usually means tightening identification criteria or capping service levels, decisions that directly affect which students receive support.

Even at 44% state coverage, the cross-subsidy that districts absorb from their general funds exceeds $400 million a year. Every new IEP adds to the total. Minnesota added 3,520 special education students in 2026 alone, and the Blue Ribbon Commission tasked with finding $250 million in savings has not yet reported. Meanwhile, the legislature cut special education transportation reimbursement by $43.2 million over two years. The 20% threshold is symbolic. The billion-dollar structural gap between what the law requires and what the state funds is not.

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Minnesota's Charter Movement Hits a Ceiling

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Minnesota 2025-26 Enrollment.

In 2008-09, Minnesota's charter sector added 4,742 students in a single year. In 2025-26, it added 418.

That is the smallest annual gain in the 20 years of available data, a 0.6% increase for a sector that tripled over the prior two decades. Minnesota's 169 charter schools enrolled 72,770 students in 2025-26, 8.3% of statewide K-12 enrollment, the same share as the year before. The state that passed the nation's first charter school law in 1991 has, 35 years later, hit a ceiling.

The plateau arrived just as the sector began shrinking in a different way: the number of charter entities peaked at 181 in 2023-24 and fell to 169 by 2025-26, a net loss of 12 schools in two years. Nine closed in 2024 alone, the most in a single year since the movement began.

Thirty-Five Years of Growth, Then a Stall

Minnesota's charter sector has tripled since 2006-07, from 23,701 students in 131 schools to 72,770 in 169 schools. But the growth came in three distinct eras, each slower than the last.

From 2007 to 2014, charters grew from 2.8% to 5.2% of statewide enrollment, adding roughly 2,900 students per year. New schools opened at a pace of seven to 15 annually. From 2014 to 2020, the pace slowed: share rose from 5.2% to 7.0%, with annual gains of about 3,100. Then COVID scrambled the picture. Charter enrollment surged by 3,236 students in 2020-21 as families fled traditional districts, which lost 24,356 students in a single year.

Since 2022, the picture has changed. Annual charter growth dropped to 608 in 2021-22, recovered partially to 2,586 in 2024-25, then collapsed to 418 in 2025-26. Share gains decelerated from half a percentage point per year during COVID to 0.08 points this year.

The 418-student gain in 2025-26 is worth comparing to the traditional sector's loss of 3,989 students that same year. Charters are no longer growing fast enough to absorb even a fraction of the students leaving traditional districts. The traditional sector actually gained 4,193 students in 2024-25 before giving them right back.

The Closure Wave

Of the 245 charter entities that have appeared in state enrollment data since 2006-07, 76 have closed. That is 31%, closely matching a Sahan Journal investigation that found one-third of all Minnesota charters ever opened have shuttered.

The closures accelerated sharply in 2023-24 and 2024-25. Nine entities disappeared from state data in 2024, including LoveWorks Academy for Arts, which at its peak enrolled 362 students, and Upper Mississippi Academy in St. Paul, which had 313 students before financial difficulties forced its doors shut. Five more closed in 2025, including Athlos Academy of Saint Cloud, which had reached 687 students before its authorizer declined to renew its contract.

New openings have nearly stopped. Only one new charter entity appeared in state data in each of the last three years, down from 10 in 2021-22. The net effect: 14 fewer charter schools operating in Minnesota than two years ago.

Who Charters Serve

The sector's demographics explain both its political importance and the stakes of its stagnation. Minnesota's charter schools serve a fundamentally different student body than its traditional districts.

Black students make up 31.8% of charter enrollment but 10.9% of traditional enrollment, a ratio of 2.9 to 1. Asian students, many from Minnesota's large Hmong community, comprise 15.2% of charter enrollment versus 6.4% in traditional districts. White students are 34.1% of charter enrollment, compared with 61.7% of traditional districts.

Hmong College Prep Academy^↗ in Brooklyn Park enrolls 2,456 students and serves a predominantly Hmong student body. Higher Ground Academy^↗ in St. Paul, which enrolls 1,177 students, serves a nearly 100% Black, predominantly Somali community. Hiawatha Academies^↗ in Minneapolis grew from 145 students in 2008 to 1,683 in 2026. These are not schools that exist to offer suburban families an alternative to their already-functional district. They are institutions built around specific communities.

That makes the charter ceiling a different kind of problem than it would be in states where charters primarily serve as escape valves from large urban districts. In Minnesota, a shrinking charter sector means fewer options for communities that built schools specifically because the traditional system was not serving them.

What Stopped the Growth

The most direct factor is arithmetic. New openings dropped to one per year while closures surged to nine. No sector can grow when it is losing more schools than it creates.

But the reasons behind the closure wave are themselves contested. Charter advocates point to a hostile funding environment: Minnesota charters receive roughly 70% of the per-pupil funding that traditional districts get, since they receive state funds but not local property tax revenue. Governor Walz's 2025-26 budget proposal would cut an additional $40 million from charter funding, including eliminating long-term facilities maintenance support and special education tuition adjustments.

"Charter schools are currently asked to operate with 30 percent less funding than their public-school counterparts." — Letter to Minnesota Legislature, cited in City Journal, 2025

On the other side, the Minnesota Department of Education has increased accountability requirements, creating three dedicated fraud detection positions and requiring authorizers to file more than 1,000 pages of documentation per school annually. The 2024 legislative session imposed new charter requirements, including language access plans, procurement policies, and documentation mandates that add administrative burden to an already-stretched sector. Proponents of stronger oversight argue that closures represent the system working as intended: low-performing schools exit, protecting students from sustained failure.

The national picture suggests Minnesota is not alone. The Network for Public Education reported that 50 charter schools nationwide announced closures in the first half of 2025 alone, adding to 218 that closed or never opened between 2022 and 2024.

Consolidation, Not Collapse

The data tells a story that is more nuanced than either "charters are dying" or "charters are thriving." What is actually happening is consolidation. The average charter school in Minnesota enrolled 431 students in 2025-26, up from 181 in 2006-07. Small, fragile charters are closing. Larger, established ones are stable or still growing.

Minnesota Transitions Charter School^↗, the state's largest charter, grew from 1,274 students in 2007 to 6,425 in 2026, with a COVID-era surge from 3,593 to 5,508 in a single year. Metro Schools Charter quadrupled from 400 students in 2020 to 1,643 in 2026. But the schools that closed were almost all small: of the 23 charters that closed since 2020, the median peak enrollment was 105 students. Only four ever exceeded 350, and only one, Athlos Academy of Saint Cloud at 687, could be considered mid-sized.

This consolidation pattern carries a risk. The charter sector is increasingly dependent on a small number of large operators. If a school like Minnesota Transitions, which alone accounts for 4.4% of all charter enrollment, were to face difficulties, the impact would ripple across the sector's enrollment totals.

The Question Minnesota Invented

Minnesota passed the nation's first charter school law on June 4, 1991. The original statute allowed a maximum of eight schools, with only school districts authorized to sponsor them. That cap was lifted, the authorizer framework was expanded, and by the mid-2000s the sector was growing at double-digit rates.

Thirty-five years later, the state's charter share sits at 8.3%, and the growth engine has stalled. Whether that represents a natural market equilibrium, the accumulated effect of a funding structure that starves smaller schools, or something else entirely depends on which side of the charter debate you occupy. The data cannot adjudicate between those explanations.

What the data does show is the next pressure point. Governor Walz's proposed $685 million in education cuts over four years would hit both sectors, but charters, with their thinner financial margins, have less room to absorb the blow. The nine closures in 2024 happened before those cuts take effect. The 2026-27 enrollment numbers will reveal whether the plateau becomes a decline.

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

43% Black: How St. Cloud Became Minnesota's Most Transformed District

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Minnesota 2025-26 Enrollment.

In 2006-07, St. Cloud^↗ enrolled 9,557 students. Nearly four out of five were white. Black students made up 12.1% of the district, a small minority in a city that had been overwhelmingly Scandinavian and German for generations.

By 2025-26, the numbers had inverted. Black students are now 43.0% of enrollment, the largest group in the district. White students have dropped to 33.8%. The total enrollment barely changed: 10,232 students, just 675 more than 20 years ago. But the composition of those classrooms is unrecognizable.

No mid-size district in Minnesota has undergone a transformation this fast. St. Cloud's Black enrollment share is 3.4 times the statewide average of 12.6%, and it exceeds Minneapolis, where Black students make up 26.8% of enrollment. The shift was driven overwhelmingly by one community: Somali refugees and their American-born children, who began arriving in Central Minnesota at the turn of the century and have reshaped the district's identity, its budget, and its politics.

The Crossover

The trend lines crossed in 2021, when Black enrollment share (41.4%) surpassed white enrollment share (40.5%) for the first time. That crossover was the culmination of two decades of steady, compounding change: Black enrollment grew from 1,161 students in 2006-07 to 4,399 in 2025-26, an increase of 279%. White enrollment fell from 7,545 to 3,462, a decline of 54.1%.

St. Cloud became majority-minority in 2018, when the white share dropped below 50% for the first time. It has fallen every year since. Meanwhile, the district's Hispanic population has grown 256%, from 347 students to 1,234, making Hispanic students 12.1% of enrollment in 2025-26, up from 3.6% in 2006-07.

The district's demographic profile now looks nothing like the state it sits in. Statewide, Minnesota's Black enrollment share crept from 9.1% to 12.6% over the same period. St. Cloud's share grew more than 30 percentage points. The gap between St. Cloud and the state average widened from 3 points in 2007 to more than 30 points by 2026.

Somali Resettlement and the Remaking of Central Minnesota

The mechanism behind St. Cloud's transformation is not ambiguous. Somali families began resettling in the St. Cloud area through federal refugee programs around 2000, drawn by resettlement agencies operating in the region, affordable housing, and meatpacking and manufacturing jobs. Secondary migration from initial placements in other states, particularly New York and Texas, amplified the flow.

By 2020, St. Cloud's city-wide Black population had reached nearly 15,000, up from approximately 1,700 in 2000. Nearly 4,400 St. Cloud residents claim Somali heritage. Statewide, approximately 107,000 people of Somali descent live in Minnesota, the largest Somali community in the United States. Nearly 58% were born in the U.S.

The school enrollment data captures something the census underestimates. Because Somali families tend to be young, with 47.1% of Minnesota's Somali population under 17, their share of the school-age population far outpaces their share of the general population. The city's overall Black population is roughly 20% according to the 2020 Census; in the schools, it is 43%.

"I think the first thing people do when they get their citizenship is to vote." — Ahmed Abdi, journalist, on Somali civic engagement in St. Cloud, MPR News, Oct. 2024

The community's growing civic presence extends beyond the classroom. Multiple Somali-American candidates have run for city council and state legislative seats, and political scientist Matt Lindstrom has observed that two decades of settlement have given the community "more capital, both financial and social capital" to engage politically.

One in Four Students Is an English Learner

The demographic shift created a parallel operational challenge: language services. In 2025-26, 2,401 students in St. Cloud were classified as English learners, 23.5% of total enrollment. That is nearly double the statewide average. The EL population grew 66% from 1,444 in 2014, peaked at 2,466 in 2019, dipped during the pandemic years, and has now returned to its pre-COVID level.

The operational weight of that concentration falls on specific schools. PBS NewsHour reported that at Talahi Elementary, roughly 45% of students are Somali, and at Apollo High School, nearly a quarter of 1,400 students are Somali. Out of more than 700 teachers in the district, only one is Somali.

The district has responded with programmatic innovation. St. Cloud launched Minnesota's first Somali language immersion program for incoming kindergarteners. The dual immersion model splits the school day between Somali and English instruction across all subjects. Abdi Mahad, who created the elementary curriculum, has noted that many Somali-American students speak Somali at home but cannot read or write it.

"Research shows that kids who learn to first read and write their native language gain the skills to better acquire a second language." — Abdi Mahad, curriculum designer, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine

The Funding Gap Behind the Numbers

St. Cloud's transformation has not come with matching resources. The district ranks as Minnesota's least adequately funded, receiving approximately 66% of needed state support according to a 2023 MPR analysis. With 70% of students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch and nearly 25% receiving special education services, the district's cost structure reflects a student body with intensive needs.

Special education enrollment has risen steadily, from 20.0% of the student body in 2014 to 24.9% in 2025-26. One in four St. Cloud students now receives special education services. (EL and special education populations overlap substantially; these figures should not be added together.) Finance director Amy Skaalerud has described the district's special education and English learner services as generating "large cross subsidies that are underfunded" at both state and federal levels.

In 2025, federal funding uncertainty compounded the pressure. The district was waiting on more than $1 million in federal grants, including $250,000 in Title III funds specifically earmarked for English learner support.

Growing, Not Shrinking

St. Cloud's demographic story is unusual in another respect: total enrollment has held steady and recently grown. Most Minnesota districts are shrinking. The state lost 20,028 students between 2020 and 2026. St. Cloud gained 61 over that span, and in the last two years it has surged: enrollment jumped from 9,286 in 2022-23 to 10,232 in 2025-26, an increase of 946 students. Board member Al Dahlgren told St. Cloud Live that in his 13 years on the board, he had not seen anything like the recent growth.

The growth is driven entirely by students of color. White enrollment fell by 68 students between 2022-23 and 2025-26. Black enrollment grew by 577, Hispanic by 376, and multiracial by 49.

District officials noted that over 400 students transferred in from charter schools or other districts in the most recent year.

No Comparable Peer

Among Minnesota's mid-size districts, no peer comes close to St. Cloud's demographic profile. Rochester, the state's third-largest district, has a Black enrollment share of 17.2%. Moorhead sits at 16.6%, Mankato at 14.5%, and Willmar at 14.2%. St. Cloud's 43.0% is in a category by itself.

Even Minneapolis, the state's largest and most diverse urban district, enrolls a smaller share of Black students at 26.8%. St. Cloud, a city of 69,000 an hour northwest of the Twin Cities, has a higher concentration of Black students than any other traditional school district in Minnesota.

The district's 2026-29 achievement plan reflects the stakes. Graduation rates for Black students stood at 65.4% in 2024. For Hispanic students, the rate was 43.8%. Third-grade reading proficiency for Black students was 43%, and for Hispanic students, 12.1%. The district has set a goal of 85% graduation rates for underrepresented groups by 2029.

The teacher gap

The question for St. Cloud is whether the infrastructure catches up to the students. The district has grown more diverse than any comparable community in Minnesota, but its teacher workforce remains 91.5% white. Federal funding for EL services is uncertain. Special education cross-subsidies are growing. And a community that has experienced documented tensions around demographic change is now at a point where the plurality group in the schools is the population that arrived most recently.

The 2026-27 kindergarten cohort will provide the next signal. If the recent pattern holds, with 1,000 students enrolling for the first time in the most recent year alone, St. Cloud's total enrollment will push toward levels not seen since the mid-2010s, even as it continues losing white students.

Meanwhile, at an elementary school in St. Cloud, a class of kindergarteners is learning to read and write in Somali before switching to English after lunch. The dual immersion program, the first of its kind in Minnesota, is built on a simple premise from curriculum designer Abdi Mahad: children who are literate in their home language learn a second language faster. It is the kind of program that only exists in a district where 43% of students are Black, where 2,401 are learning English, and where one Somali teacher serves a workforce of more than 700.

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

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.

Minnesota Publishes 2025-26 Enrollment Data

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Minnesota 2025-26 Enrollment.

Last year looked like the turning point. Minnesota's 2024-25 enrollment climbed by 6,779 students — the first meaningful gain since before the pandemic. School boards that had spent four years cutting budgets and closing buildings allowed themselves cautious optimism. Maybe the worst was over. Maybe the state had finally bounced off the bottom.

Then the Minnesota Department of Education posted its 2025-26 enrollment figures, and the bounce vanished: 873,175 public school students, down 3,571 from the prior year. That wipes out more than half of last year's gain in a single year. The state is back at the COVID floor, just 1,092 students above the 2022-23 low of 872,083 — a recovery of 5.2% from the 21,120 students lost between the 2019-20 peak of 893,203 and the trough. Whatever floor people thought they saw last year was not a floor. It was a dead cat bounce.

What the numbers open up

The enrollment data covers 535 districts — 366 traditional and 169 charter — across a state that stretches from the Twin Cities suburbs to the Iron Range. Over the coming weeks, The MNEdTribune will unpack it in a series of data-driven articles. Here is what jumps out first.

Hispanic enrollment dropped for the first time in 18 years. Minnesota's Hispanic student population fell by 137 students in 2025-26 after nearly two decades of unbroken growth that doubled the count from 48,000 to over 101,000. The timing — coinciding with heightened federal immigration enforcement — raises hard questions about whether one of the state's most reliable demographic engines has stalled.

White enrollment has fallen by 130,507 students since 2007. The white share of Minnesota's public schools dropped from 77.2% to 59.4% over two decades, a shift of nearly 18 percentage points. Every other racial group has grown. The state that was once synonymous with Scandinavian homogeneity is becoming something fundamentally different, and the enrollment data is the clearest measure of how fast.

Only 5.2% of COVID losses have been recovered. Minnesota lost 21,120 students between 2019-20 and 2022-23. Two years later, the state has clawed back just 1,092 of them. That 5.2% recovery rate ranks among the worst in the country, and the 2025-26 drop suggests the gap is about to widen again.

By the numbers: 873,175 students statewide in 2025-26 — down 3,571 from last year, erasing more than half of the prior year's 6,779-student bounce. The state sits just 1,092 students above its post-COVID low.

The threads we are following

St. Cloud is 43% Black — and almost nobody outside Minnesota knows. The Somali community's transformation of St. Cloud's schools is one of the most dramatic demographic stories in American public education, and the 2025-26 data shows it deepening. The district's trajectory challenges every assumption about what "Minnesota nice" looks like in practice.

Special education is approaching one in five. The share of students receiving special education services hit 19.3% statewide — up from 14.8% in 2014 — with a cross-subsidy estimated at over $1 billion. At the current trajectory, Minnesota will cross the 20% threshold within two years.

The state's largest school has no building. MN Connections Academy enrolled 4,149 students in 2025-26, making it the single largest campus in the state. The virtual sector's persistence — years after the pandemic emergency that fueled its growth — is reshaping how districts think about enrollment, funding, and competition.

What comes next

This is the first in a series of articles examining what the 2025-26 enrollment data reveals about Minnesota public schools. New articles publish weekly on Mondays.

The enrollment figures come from the MDE Report Card. The data covers headcount enrollment for public school districts statewide.

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