When Louisiana’s public schools opened this year, the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana said they were returning to emptier classrooms as total enrollment declined to its lowest level in 16 years.

Classrooms will be much emptier when school choice that was approved by the Legislature eventually goes into effect. Act 1 of 2024 created the LA GATOR scholarship  program. You can forget that LA GATOR stands for Louisiana Giving All True Opportunity to Rise.

The school choice program provides the framework for education savings accounts for students administered by the state Department of Education. Rules will be adopted by the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE).

The state’s school choice program will be implemented in three phases, according to edchoice.org. However, a timeline hasn’t been established for when the phases will start and when the Legislature will start appropriating money,

Previous news reports said when the third phase begins, families will  receive from $5,200 to as much as $15,000 annually to use in selecting schools of choice for their children.

Education Week reported in January that school districts large and small, from California to New York, are considering closures as they confront enrollment drops that have accelerated in recent years. An official with a research and consulting firm said there is no sign of the trend reversing.

“The surprise is just how quickly those declines have come about in the last few years,” according to edweek.org.

The causes include lower birth rates, families opting out of public education and education shifts during the pandemic. The website reported that some recent research suggests that between 2000 and 2018, schools with majority Black student bodies were about three times as likely to close as schools with smaller proportions of Black students.

PAR’s report said Louisiana reached its peak in public school student enrollment in 2016 when enrollment totaled over 722,000 students. The state started seeing annual drops in student count beginning in 2017.

The most recent data from the state Department of Education shows Louisiana had 680,023 students enrolled in K-12 public schools in February 2024. The numbers include students in public charter schools.

In the years since 2017, PAR said the state’s public elementary and secondary schools have lost 41,174 students, which it said is nearly equivalent to the population of Alexandria.

U.S. Census Bureau data shows Louisiana population has fallen in recent years with more than 75,000 fewer state residents since 2020. The data also shows that the number of school-aged children in Louisiana has been shrinking even longer, declining by 140,000 children or 13% since 2000.

PAR said many parents turned to homeschooling their children during the pandemic. In the 2023-24 school year, 17,049 students were homeschooled.

Racial enrollments in K-12 public schools as of February this year are Black, 284,276, 41.8%; White, 280,539, 41.3%; Hispanic, 74,839, 11.0%; Asian, 10,871, 1.6%; multiple races, 25,219, 3.7%.

PAR said Hispanic students were the only ethnic or racial group to grow in enrollment over the last seven years, with a 59% increase. Almost 4,000 new Hispanic students have enrolled in Louisiana public schools yearly since 2017.

About 495,000 children, 73% of the students attending the state’s public schools, are classified as economically disadvantaged.

PAR said that means they are eligible for food assistance programs for low-income families, Medicaid, reduced-price school meals or other government-financed programs for needy families.

Some of those students are English language learners whose first language is not English. Others are identified as being homeless or as migrants, are incarcerated or have been placed in state custody.

School choice is going to have a tremendous impact on Louisiana’s public schools and on those disadvantaged students. It’s long past time for public education leaders to find some solutions for major student losses.

Public school advocates in Nebraska came up with a possible solution. Support Our Schools Nebraska got enough signatures to put a proposal on the Nov. 5 ballot in that state that is asking voters to repeal a new law that uses taxpayer money to fund private school tuition.

Louisiana, unfortunately, doesn’t have the initiative and referendum that allows citizens to collect signatures to place legislation on the ballot for voters to decide.

The future for public schools in Louisiana looks awfully bleak.

Jim Beam, the retired editor of the American Press, has covered people and politics for more than six decades. Contact him at 337-515-8871 or jim.beam.press@gmail.com.