The missing: Black students left NYC public schools after COVID

By ARIAMA C. LONG Amsterdam News Staff, Report for America Corps Member

In 2020, students left schools nationwide in droves. A project between Stanford University, Big Local News, and the Associated Press (AP) worked together to figure out what happened to them. Locally collected data shows that mostly Black and lowincome students left the New York City public school system in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic.

The extensive project surveyed state-level data for all public schools, private schools in 35 states, and homeschooling in 33 states from school years 2019 to 2022 in an attempt to find the “missing kids.” It was determined that about a third of the nation’s public school decline was unexplained, meaning students may have skipped kindergarten, went into unregistered homeschooling, are still afraid of COVID-19, are homeless, have left the country, are struggling with mental health issues, were simply absent, or left for the workforce.

The fact that students weren’t adequately tracked or inquired about after the chaos of the pan- demic highlighted a systemic problem that also largely became a budgeting problem. Many states fund their schools based on how many students they have. A loss in enrollment meant a loss of money.

The data found that New York State had about 60,182 missing students ages 5 to 17, although the project posits that numbers could be much higher. The numbers get more granular when homing in on New York City, as do the reasons that certain groups of students seemingly fled the school system.

Education Justice Research and Organizing Collaborative Director Matt Gonzales said that based on numbers his organization crunched, Black students specifically were exiting the school system at the highest rates while wealthy white students are increasing in numbers. This was due to “no doubt, the impacts of gentrification and increasing unaffordability of NYC, as well as the pandemic,” said Gonzales.

The Department of Education (DOE) had preliminary data and enrollment figures for the 2022 to 2023 school year available as of October 31. The final enrollment data will be available in the spring, but as of this February, there was a decrease of 1.8% in grades K to

12 instead of the almost 4% decrease in 2021 to 2022 and the year before. The number of enrolled students currently in the city’s school system is approximately 903,000, according to the DOE.

Coalition for Educational Justice Director Natasha Capers said that every year, there are at least hundreds of students in temporary housing or shelters that schools can’t account for. She said the dilemma of declining birth rates has also affected enrollment rates.

“Every year since 2016, we have seen a decline in district enrollment, but the decline appears to be reducing as we come out of the pandemic and establish efforts to increase enrollment. Over the last 15 years in New York City, we’ve also seen a falling birth rate, which has contributed to a drop in enrollment,” said the DOE.

The DOE said that recent drops in enrollment are driven by both