Other factors in the student losses Martinez mentioned were the cityвЂ™s declining birthrate and fallout from the pandemic, when the district was caught up in a contentious standoff with its teachers union over reopening school buildings. The neighborhoods that saw the most pronounced enrollment losses were Pilsen on the cityвЂ™s Lower West Side, Little Village on the Southwest Side and Lincoln Park on the North Side. He added, вЂњOne thing I am not in favor of is disrupting the lives of our children.вЂќ вЂњBefore I approach a community about closing schools, I want to look at how we can make these schools more attractive.вЂќ вЂњMy first question is, вЂWhat are we offering children in each individual school?вЂ™вЂќ he said. He vowed to approach the prospect of closing or consolidating any buildings slowly and cautiously. He wants to set a districtwide standard for programming that should be available in each area of the city.Д«ut Martinez stressed he is not in a hurry to shutter any shrinking campuses before a new elected school board bill that includes a moratorium on school closures goes into effect next year. In a virtual meeting with reporters, Pedro Martinez, who took over as district CEO last month, said a top goal is to conduct a detailed analysis of program offerings across all neighborhoods - an undertaking he said might offer clues about why some families are leaving the district for private schools, the suburbs, and beyond. But declines continued in the other early grades, while numbers remained relatively flat at the high school level. The district saw rebounding numbers in prekindergarten, where last year it experienced the sharpest drop. Racial and ethnic groups shrank at a comparable rate, and its makeup by race remains unchanged since before the COVID-19 outbreak. In Chicago, where the overall enrollment is down by almost a fifth over the past decade, the outbreak exacerbated a trend of accelerating declines. The pandemic and resulting school closures have put unprecedented pressure on public school rolls across the country, which were already contending with declining birth rates in many areas.

Over the past two years, the district saw a 15% increase in transfers to other school districts, a 25% rise in departures for private schools, and an almost 200% jump in students homeschooled by their families - though the number of homeschoolers remains less than 5% of the districtвЂ™s enrollment. Following its steepest enrollment drop in two decades in 2020, the district has experienced a net loss of almost 25,000 students since the start of the pandemic. The district did see an uptick in the number of new students it enrolled this fall, but that was not large enough to offset a growing number of students leaving Chicago Public Schools - more than 53,700 since last fall.

Miami-Dade reports an enrollment of only about 1,000 fewer students than Chicago this school year. With a total enrollment of 330,411 students, the district appears poised to hold on to the title of the countryвЂ™s third largest - but just barely. Reporting declines among all racial groups and a spike in students decamping for private schools, Chicago Public Schools shrank by another roughly 10,000 students this fall, or about 3% of its student body.

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