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St. Louis Post-Dispatch: There are 5,500 fewer students in public schools in St. Louis County and nearly 3,000 fewer in St. Louis city this year compared to 2019-2020. Even in St. Charles County with a growing population, the number of public school students fell by 558 in the last three years. Fox School District, the largest in Jefferson County with 10,800 students, is down by more than 400 students in the same period.
Across the U.S., hundreds of thousands of students are still unaccounted for after dropping out of public schools during the pandemic, according to an analysis by The Associated Press and Stanford University.
The “missing” students received crisis-level attention in 2020 after the pandemic closed schools nationwide. In the years since, they have become largely a budgeting problem. School leaders and some state officials worry aloud about the fiscal challenges their districts face if these students don’t come back.
States such as Missouri where kindergarten is optional are more likely to have larger numbers of unaccounted-for students, suggesting the missing also include many young learners kept home instead of enrolling in school. The state also doesn’t require registration for home schools, making it difficult to track the number of students.