In this series: Washington 2025-26 Enrollment.

For three consecutive years, Washington's public schools had been clawing back enrollment. Between 2022 and 2025, the state added 14,041 students, a slow but visible recovery from the 55,539-student crater the pandemic carved. Superintendents from Spokane to Vancouver had reason to believe the bottom was in.

Then OSPI published its 2025-26 enrollment figures, and the bottom wasn't in: 1,096,285 students statewide, down 9,099 from the prior year. That is the largest single-year drop since the pandemic year itself, and it erases 64.8% of the three-year recovery in a single stroke. Whatever floor people thought they saw last year was not a floor.

What the numbers open up

The enrollment file covers 328 districts and more than 2,400 schools, with breakdowns by grade level, race, gender, and special population status across 17 years of data. Over the coming weeks, The WAEdTribune will unpack it in a series of data-driven articles. Here is what jumps out first.

White students are now a minority in Washington's schools. White enrollment dropped below 50% in 2022 and has kept falling — to 47.1% in 2026, a loss of 140,996 white students since 2010. Hispanic enrollment surged 74% in the same period. The demographic transformation happened with remarkably little public awareness.

Seattle spent a decade building, then six years erased it. Seattle^↗ peaked at 56,051 students in 2020 and has fallen to 50,898, a 9.2% decline that has forced the district into contentious school closure debates. The state's largest district lost students in six consecutive years, and nothing in the pipeline suggests a reversal.

By the numbers: 1,096,285 students statewide in 2025-26 — down 9,099 from the prior year, the largest single-year loss since the pandemic and a reversal that erased nearly two-thirds of a three-year recovery.

The threads we are following

Kindergarten is down 16%, and high school is booming. The state enrolled 69,338 kindergartners in 2025-26, the smallest K class in 17 years. Meanwhile, grade 12 hit a record 98,754 students. The state now graduates 29,416 more students each year than it enrolls as kindergartners. The pipeline runs in one direction.

One in 25 students was homeless last year. Washington's homeless student count tripled from 13,729 in 2010 to 43,542 in 2025 before dropping to 31,560 in 2026. The crisis accelerated with the state's housing costs. The 2026 decline may not be good news — it coincides with a 76% cut to McKinney-Vento funding.

English learners doubled to 1 in 7. LEP enrollment grew from 81,704 in 2010 to 150,627 in 2026, a 84.4% increase. In districts like Yakima, English learners now approach half the student body. The funding and staffing implications are immense.

What comes next

Each of these threads will get its own article with charts, district-level breakdowns, and context from local reporting. New articles publish Wednesdays. The first deep dive, next week, examines Washington's majority-minority crossover and what it means for a state that was nearly two-thirds white just 16 years ago.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.