The number of students enrolled in public schools in Connecticut has continued to decline in the 2024-2025 school year. According to data from the Connecticut State Department of Education (CSDE), there are 508,402 children enrolled in public schools for the current school year.
That number is down from 512,652 enrolled students in 2023-2024, a loss of 4,250 students. There are roughly 33,400 fewer students enrolled in the current school year than a decade ago and roughly 19,400 fewer students enrolled than in the 2019-2020 school year, when schools closed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The loss is not explained by increased enrollment in nonpublic schools. According to CSDE’s data on nonpublic enrollment, there were approximately 53,000 students enrolled in nonpublic schools in 2023-2024, the last year for which data is currently available. That number is slightly below the roughly 53,600 students enrolled in nonpublic schools in 2019-2020. It’s also down from the roughly 56,200 students enrolled in nonpublic schools in 2017-2018.
Connecticut is not the only state where students have gone “missing” following the COVID-19 pandemic. An Associated Press story from 2023 found approximately 230,000 students from across 21 states who had dropped out of public schools but not enrolled in private schools.
While homeschooled students are accounted for in the AP’s count of missing students, CSDE does not require homeschooling parents to report this data to the state and does not have accurate figures on the number of homeschooled students in the state.
Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing 10 percent or more of school days for any reason, has also increased post-pandemic. According to the Brookings Institute, the number of chronically absent students nearly doubled between 2018-2019 and 2021-2022, rising from 15 percent to 28 percent. Brookings’ analysis also found that the number of chronically absent students only marginally declined during the 2022-2023 school year.
Connecticut has been more successful in reducing chronic absenteeism. While chronic absenteeism is still above pre-pandemic levels – at 17.7 percent for the 2023-2024 school year and 10.4 percent for the 2018-2019 school years – it has steadily decreased for the past three school years. In 2021-2022, chronic absenteeism rose to 23.7 percent. It has declined for the past three years, falling by 3.7 percent between 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 and by 2.3 percent between 2022-2023 and 2023-2024.
In 2021, CSDE introduced the Learner Engagement and Attendance Program (LEAP), which was intended to take a new approach to addressing chronic absenteeism. The program initially sent school personnel from 15 districts directly to the homes of chronically absent students. According to CSDE, attendance rates increased by percent in the first month following initial LEAP visits and continued to rise, with attendance rates up by nearly 15 percent during the 2021-2022 school year.
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