CPS enrollment increases a bit for second year in a row; also a bump in English language learners

After Chicago Public Schools enrollment increased for the first time in more than a decade last year, the total number of students has gone up once again to 324,311, officials said Thursday.

That’s a less than 1% increase compared to last year’s official count of 321,539 — and a drop from later in the school year, when newly enrolling migrant students brought numbers up by the spring.

But the overall stabilization of the school system’s enrollment for the second consecutive year represents a stunning and unexpected turnaround after more than a decade of decline.

The official enrollment count is typically done on the 20th day of school, which was Monday. But CPS officials said they haven’t finished analyzing the numbers and will have more analysis in the coming weeks. CPS chief education officer Bogdana Chkoumbova gave a preview in her remarks at Thursday’s Board of Education meeting.

There was another big bump in English language learners, up 12.4% to 86,629 children, data showed. Among age levels, the largest increase is in the youngest elementary grades — kindergarten through 5th grade — which is a promising sign that the enrollment improvement could last into the future.

Enrollment is seen as an important barometer of the health of the school district, and state and federal funding is partly based on the number of students. Low enrollment schools also tend to cost the school district more per student.

The school district saw a surge of students throughout last year. In April, it was serving 328,971, almost 6,000 students more than it had in September. It attributed much of that increase to new immigrants and said the number of students who were classified as English learners was up.

There was some concern that migrant families would leave the school district as they were forced out of shelters or because they didn’t feel their children were being well served. But there are still 9,600 more English language learners this year compared to the start of last year.

CPS also is serving almost 2,000 more students who require special education services. The share of students the school district considers low-income increased slightly, by about 5,000 kids to 232,600, or about 72% of all students.

Before 2023, CPS had lost students for 11 consecutive years, and in 2022 lost its status as the nation’s third-largest public school system. Enrollment dropped by more than 80,000 students in that time, with the sharpest decline of 15,000 kids coming during the pandemic when many children disengaged or lost touch with their schools.

Over a two-decade span, CPS enrollment fell by 116,500 students.

Experts have attributed the decline to low birth rates, families leaving the city and a decrease in immigration. For years, many schools saw kindergarten classes that were much smaller than their upper grades — in some cases eighth-grade cohorts of 130-plus students shared a building with 80-student kindergarten cohorts.

Sarah Karp covers education for WBEZ.