Hampton Roads Economic Monthly:
Now that school’s out for summer in Hampton Roads, we dug into the Virginia Department of Education’s Fall enrollment data to understand the impact COVID-19 may have had on students in the region.
Many states, including Virginia, reported declines in public school enrollment for the Fall of 2020. From 2019 to 2020, Fall enrollment overall in Hampton Roads declined by over 4.5%, while public school enrollment in the same time period in Virginia declined by nearly 3.5%. Overall Fall public school enrollment in Hampton Roads has been declining for the past 15 years at roughly 0.5% per year, so a slight decline would not have been out of the ordinary, but this was over eight times the 15-year average annual rate of decline. Other states in the Southeast experienced similar declines in enrollment, with North Carolina experiencing 4% decline, Maryland at 3%, South Carolina at 2.6%, and the District of Columbia showed a 1% decline in enrollment during 2020.