In recent two recent blog posts, we explored the aging of the Atlanta area at the regional and local levels. This demographic shift “older” mirrors a broader nationwide trend, and the shift has a myriad of policy implications. As the new school year kicks off, let’s examine how these changes have been and are reflected in terms of public school enrollment time trends. We will be using data from the Georgia Department of Education.[1]
Figure 1 below presents the total enrollment by over time for the school systems serving the ARC 11-county region, alongside enrollment for the entire region for reference. Because Atlanta’s school districts vary dramatically in size,[2] we index each school system’s enrollment to its 2010 value.[3]
Figure 1: Total Enrollment by School System, Indexed to 2010
As the charts on Figure 1 (above) show, the general trend for the region has been slow enrollment growth over most of the period since 1995, with a flattening or even a drop in most recent years. But we also see quite a lot of variation across the different systems. City Schools of Decatur, Buford City, and Forsyth County have seen dramatic growth, especially in the last 15 years or so. For example, Forsyth County has an indexed score of 160.4 for 2025, meaning that it served 60.4% more students in 2025 than it did in 2010.[2] But even these systems have seen growth slow down or stop in recent years. In contrast, Atlanta Public Schools (APS) had more 21.8% more students in 1995 than it did in 2010, the year that APS enrollment hit bottom. In 2025 the system served about 2.1% more students than it did in 2010. DeKalb County enrollment has been fairly flat. While the DeKalb school system served more students in 2025 than in 1995, its 2025 enrollment was only about 92% of what it was in 2010.
What can we expect going forward? One way to anticipate future trends is to compare the number of students entering the pipeline as kindergarteners with the number of students exiting as 12th graders. Figure 2 presents the number of kindergarteners per 12th grader over time by school system. The horizontal reference line in each graph at 1.0 represents the point at which the numbers are in parity: you have the same number of students entering and graduating from the school system.
Figure 2: Ratio of Kindergarteners to 12th Graders by School System
The charts in Figure 2 (above) show that kindergarteners have outnumbered 12th graders– a sign of growth– in most areas for the majority of the last 30 years. But that ratio has been narrowing over time, indicating slowing growth. And today, the ratio of kindergarteners to 12th graders is below 1.0 for twelve of the fifteen school systems serving the 11-county region, meaning that more students are exiting the school systems than are entering the school systems. Kindergarteners currently outnumber 12th graders only in Atlanta Public Schools, Marietta City, and DeKalb County.
The dual phenomena of aging population and declining birth rates are not unique to Atlanta, but rather are representative of a nationwide trend. In response, some schools will close as enrollments drop, and governments will need to innovatively repurpose facilities to meet evolving needs… perhaps as intergenerational day centers?
Notes:
[1] The Georgia Department of Education requires schools to conduct a census on a common date twice every school year. The census takes place once in early October and again in early March. This post focuses on the October numbers, also known as the fall FTE count.
[2] City Schools of Decatur, the smallest district, reported 5,367 in the Fall FTE count for SY 2025 (aka the 2024-25 school year). The largest, Gwinnett County, was two orders of magnitude larger with 182,518 total students.
[3] In other words, the number for any given district for any given year reflects the percentage of that system’s enrollment in SY 2010. For example, Buford City had an indexed value of 195.2 in 2025, meaning that the system educated nearly twice as many students that year as it did in 2010.
Download the data utilized in this blog post here: School Enrollment Time Series