Parents Punish Schools That Stayed Physically Closed during the Pandemic: Enrollment Drops were Larger in Schools that were Most Remote

In September, President Biden declared that "the pandemic is over," but parents with school-age children will not soon forget the struggles of the prior two years. Starting in March 2020, nearly all school buildings nationwide closed and remained shuttered for the rest of that school year. These closures upended families' routines, creating new challenges for parents' work and children's education. Many parents, frustrated with the lack of in-person schooling options, began to pull their children from public schools. During the 2020-21 school year, enrollment in public schools fell by an average of 3 percent nationally. These declines were larger in districts that reopened remotely compared to those that returned to in-person learning, but a careful look at enrollment data reveals that the story is more complicated than it would initially appear. That's because the districts that chose to remain closed during the 2020-21 school year were already losing enrollment in the years leading up to the pandemic. These pre-pandemic declines make it challenging to determine how much of the enrollment drop that accompanied the pandemic was driven by districts' decisions to remain remote in 2020-21. Nor have researchers yet examined whether enrollment losses continued into the 2021-22 school year. The authors take advantage of newly compiled district enrollment data for all 50 states through 2021-22, the second full school year after the pandemic's outbreak, to address these questions. After accounting for differential pre-pandemic enrollment trends, they find that enrollment impacts caused by school districts' responses to the pandemic may have been as large as, if not larger than, enrollment impacts from the pandemic itself. In short, how districts chose to respond to the pandemic mattered--and may have consequences for their finances for years to come.