Federal Way - EdTribune WA - Washington Education Data

Three Decades to the Top: Jill Burnes Takes the Helm in Enumclaw

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Jill Burnes started teaching elementary school in Bellingham, Washington in 1990. By her own account she felt "an incredible responsibility" and "a keen awareness of the influence or impact that my daily words and actions could have on my students." That awareness, she has written, only deepened over the decades. After nearly 30 years she had "more questions than answers."

Those questions took her from Bellingham to Federal Way^↗, where she taught elementary, instructed at the district's Internet Academy, and moved into leadership as curriculum coordinating teacher and eventually the director of assessment. In 2004 she came to Enumclaw^↗ as assistant principal at the high school and has been in the district ever since, rising through nine years as principal, director of teaching and learning, and deputy superintendent. Along the way she earned a master's in curriculum and instruction from City University, a principal certification, and a superintendent certification from Seattle Pacific University, with professional training at Harvard's Leadership Institute and Stanford's School Redesign Institute. When Superintendent Dr. Shaun Carey resigned suddenly on January 12, 2026, the board did not have to look far. Burnes stepped into the role she had been building toward across three decades and three districts.

She takes the helm of a district that is, by almost every measure, defying the direction of public education in Washington state.

A District Built to Grow

Enumclaw enrolled 4,568 students in 2025-26, its highest total in at least 12 years of state records. The district has grown 10.7% since 2015, adding 443 students while Washington's enrollment has been essentially flat and started declining in 2026. It is one of only about a quarter of the state's districts that fully recovered from COVID-era losses. Enumclaw did more than recover: it added 422 students beyond its pandemic low, a 212% recovery rate.

The Ten Trails master-planned community in neighboring Black Diamond is the primary growth engine, a development projected to build more than 5,000 homes. But Burnes was careful to note that the story is broader than one subdivision. "According to the most recent demographic study of the Enumclaw School District, other growth factors include local birth rates and other residential development," she said. Birth rates within the district "have been increasing steadily over the past ten years," and there are "recent, active and planned residential development projects in Enumclaw" beyond Ten Trails.

Among similarly sized Washington districts, Enumclaw's trajectory stands out. Only neighboring White River^↗ has grown faster (+23.0%), while Bremerton^↗, a military-adjacent urban district, has lost 14.1% of its students over the same period.

The community has changed, too. White students still make up the majority at 69.4%, but that share has dropped 9.4 percentage points since 2015. Hispanic enrollment grew from 14.2% to 18.0%, adding 235 students. Asian enrollment increased nearly eightfold, from 23 students to 183, likely reflecting the demographic profile of families moving to Ten Trails from the Seattle metro area.

The district's Capital Facilities Plan projects enrollment reaching 5,311 by 2030, a 23.4% increase. That is the landscape Burnes is navigating: a district preparing for nearly 750 more students in the next four years.

Stability, Relationships, Trust

Asked about her priorities, Burnes did not talk about test scores or strategic plans. She talked about people.

"My priorities include providing stability, rebuilding relationships, and strengthening trust across our district," she said. "There is important work ahead in the coming months, and I am fully committed to ensuring that our school system is well-positioned to welcome a new superintendent this summer."

The emphasis on stability is not abstract. Carey's departure was abrupt. The board accepted his resignation at a special meeting on January 12 that lasted barely long enough to conduct the vote. Board Director Tara Cochran described it as "a mutual decision to part ways." Board President Tyson Gamblin said the board "appreciates his leadership on several initiatives in the district." Carey, for his part, said he was "grateful for the work we have done to put systemwide structures, including common school schedules, MTSS practices, and progress monitoring, in place throughout the school district."

Eight days later, the board unanimously approved $65 million in contracts to design and build a new elementary school at Ten Trails. That school, planned for 600 students, is slated to open in fall 2027. Black Diamond Elementary is at capacity, and Ten Trails families are currently bused to Westwood Elementary.

The financing behind it is remarkable. After voters rejected three separate funding measures between 2023 and 2025, the district sold 43 acres back to developer Oakpointe for $40 million and secured a $25 million developer loan repaid through housing mitigation fees. The entire project is funded without a taxpayer bond or general fund dollars.

Burnes described the arrangement as the product of years of groundwork. "For more than a decade, the Enumclaw School District has been working in partnership with the City of Black Diamond and Oakpointe to plan for school facilities and projected enrollment growth," she said. That kind of long-range institutional memory, the knowledge of a decade of negotiations and three failed ballots and the community dynamics behind them, is what a career insider brings to the superintendent's chair.

What Comes Next

The board hired Northwest Leadership Associates in late February to find Carey's permanent successor. Community input sessions and online surveys in English and Spanish are underway. Preliminary interviews are scheduled for late April, with finalist interviews in mid-May.

Asked what the district should look for, Burnes offered a clear picture: "a community-focused, visionary leader who listens to all voices, communicates clearly, and brings people together around shared values," she said. "They must be willing to step into challenges, stand firm in their conviction about student learning, public education, and lead with courage and integrity."

Whether the board hires from inside or outside, the next superintendent will step into a district that has added 443 students in a decade, built a $65 million school through a creative public-private partnership, and welcomed a more diverse student body than at any point in its history. Burnes is making sure that transition is steady, the same work she has done at every level she has held in this district.

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

1 in 20 Washington Students Now Has a 504 Plan

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

On Bainbridge Island, 17% of public school students have a Section 504 disability accommodation plan. In Federal Way^↗, 30 miles to the southeast and serving a student body more than six times as large, the rate is 2.9%.

Both districts operate under the same federal law. Both serve students with ADHD, anxiety, diabetes, and other conditions that can substantially limit a major life activity. The enrollment data cannot measure disability prevalence directly, only identification rates. But a sixfold gap between neighboring districts points less to differences in how many students have disabilities than to differences in who gets evaluated and who gets the paperwork that converts a diagnosis into a classroom accommodation.

Statewide, Section 504 plans have quadrupled over 16 years, from 13,762 students (1.3% of enrollment) in 2009-10 to a peak of 60,833 (5.5%) in 2024-25. Combined with the 16.4% special education rate that year, more than one in five Washington students carried some form of documented disability accommodation. That combined rate was 14.5% in 2010.

Then, in 2025-26, 504 plans dropped by 6,440 students, the largest single-year decline on record.

The law changed before the culture did

The acceleration began before COVID, before the youth mental health crisis entered the national vocabulary, before pandemic-era telehealth made ADHD diagnoses easier to obtain. It started with a legal change.

The Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act of 2008, effective January 2009, broadened the definition of disability under both the ADA and Section 504. The new standard lowered the threshold: impairments no longer needed to "prevent or severely or significantly restrict" a major life activity to qualify. The law expanded the list of major life activities to include concentrating, reading, and thinking, and it barred schools from considering how well a student's medication or coping strategies managed their condition.

For students with ADHD, the effect was immediate. A student earning good grades could no longer be denied a 504 plan on that basis alone. Federal guidance later reinforced that "grades alone are an insufficient basis" for determining whether a student has a disability.

Washington's data shows the result. In 2009-10, 184 districts reported any 504 students. By 2024-25, 283 districts did. The statewide count grew every single year from 2010 through 2019, averaging 3,825 new 504 plans annually.

The pandemic interrupted, then turbocharged growth

COVID-19 briefly reversed the trend. Schools lost 1,062 Section 504 students in 2019-20 and another 1,477 in 2020-21, as remote learning made evaluations difficult and some families disengaged from formal accommodation processes entirely.

The rebound was swift and steep. From 2021-22 to 2022-23, the state added 8,363 Section 504 students in a single year, an 18.0% jump that dwarfed any pre-pandemic annual increase. The post-pandemic growth rate from 2021 to 2025 averaged 3,797 new plans per year, roughly matching the pre-pandemic pace, but compressed into a recovery surge that peaked in 2022-23 and 2023-24.

The timing coincides with a national surge in ADHD diagnoses. Between 2016 and 2022, approximately one million additional children received ADHD diagnoses nationwide, bringing the overall rate to 11.4% of children ages 3 to 17. Post-pandemic awareness campaigns, expanded telehealth access, and heightened attention to youth mental health all contributed to more families seeking evaluations.

But rising diagnoses alone do not explain the pattern in Washington's data. If they did, 504 rates would be climbing at roughly similar rates everywhere. They are not.

Where you live determines whether you get identified

The correlation between district wealth and 504 identification is stark. Among Washington districts with at least 2,000 students, the correlation between a district's economically disadvantaged rate and its Section 504 rate is -0.62: the more affluent the district, the higher the 504 rate.

Bainbridge Island^↗, where fewer than 15% of students are economically disadvantaged, identifies 17.0% of its enrollment on 504 plans. Northshore^↗, a large suburban district north of Kirkland, identifies 10.7%. Snoqualmie Valley^↗ and Shoreline^↗ both exceed 10%.

At the other end: Yakima^↗, where more than 75% of students are economically disadvantaged, identifies 3.4%. Highline^↗, just south of Seattle, identifies 1.3%. Federal Way, at 2.9%, serves a student body nearly the size of Bainbridge Island, Mercer Island, Snoqualmie Valley, and Shoreline combined.

This pattern is consistent with national research. A policy brief from the National Education Policy Center found that Section 504's "broad eligibility criteria, lack of funding, and substantial deference to the professional judgment of educators" have favored families with the resources to pursue private evaluations. White students are more than twice as likely as Black or Hispanic students to have a 504 plan nationally, despite comparable rates of underlying conditions like ADHD.

"Section 504's broad eligibility criteria, lack of funding, and substantial deference to the professional judgment of educators and external evaluators have favored powerful and privileged families." -- National Education Policy Center, 2024

The mechanism is straightforward. Section 504 is an unfunded federal mandate. Unlike special education under IDEA, which carries dedicated federal funding, 504 plans bring no additional dollars to districts. Schools must provide the accommodations (extended test time, preferential seating, modified assignments, breaks for medication) but receive nothing to pay for them. Districts with smaller caseloads have less institutional infrastructure for evaluations. Families in those districts may not know a 504 plan exists, may lack access to private psychologists who can document a qualifying condition, or may face language barriers in navigating the referral process.

The 2025-26 reversal

After 13 years of growth interrupted only by COVID, Section 504 plans fell by 6,440 students in 2025-26, dropping from 60,833 to 54,393. The statewide rate slid from 5.5% to 5.0%.

The decline was not uniform. Eight fewer districts reported any 504 students at all (275, down from 283). Some individual district drops suggest reporting changes rather than genuine declines: Cheney^↗ fell from 186 to one, and Grandview fell from 71 to two, patterns more consistent with a data submission issue than a mass revocation of accommodation plans.

But the drop also touched large districts with no obvious reporting anomaly. Seattle^↗ lost 458 Section 504 students. Lake Washington^↗ lost 310. Lake Stevens^↗ lost 292. Battle Ground lost 576. Whether these reflect tightened identification criteria, families leaving the public system, or a natural plateau after a decade of rapid expansion is not yet clear from the data alone.

What 1 in 5 means for schools

Even after the 2025-26 decline, the combined accommodation rate tells a structural story. In 2025-26, 54,393 students hold 504 plans (5.0%) and 169,080 receive special education services (15.4%). Together, that is 20.4% of Washington's enrollment, up from 14.5% in 2010.

This is not a temporary phenomenon. The special education rate has climbed steadily from 13.2% to 15.4% over 17 years, and Section 504 rates, even with the 2025-26 correction, remain nearly four times their 2010 level.

For districts, the fiscal implication is real. Special education carries per-pupil costs well above the base rate, funded partly through IDEA. Section 504 accommodations receive no categorical funding at all. Every extended-time test, every behavioral intervention plan, every physical accommodation comes out of the district's general fund. As 504 caseloads have grown fourfold, the unfunded cost of compliance has grown with them.

A federal law under federal challenge

The legal foundation for all of this is not as secure as it was a year ago. Seventeen states have filed suit in Texas v. Becerra challenging the constitutionality of Section 504 itself. While the lawsuit's proximate trigger was the Biden administration's 2024 rule update, the states' legal brief asks the court to "declare Section 504 unconstitutional" and "enjoin enforcement" of the law entirely. Washington is not among the plaintiff states.

If the challenge succeeds, 54,393 Washington students would lose the federal guarantee that schools must provide them with disability accommodations. Whether the state's own laws would fill that gap is an open question.

The more immediate question is local. The sixfold gap between Bainbridge Island's 17.0% identification rate and Federal Way's 2.9% is not a gap in disability prevalence. It is a gap in access to the system that documents disability and converts it into classroom support. Four times as many students hold 504 plans as in 2010. Whether the students who need them most are the ones getting them is a different question, and the data suggests they are not.

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

1 in 25 Washington Students Was Homeless Last Year

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In the 2024-25 school year, 43,542 students in Washington's public schools were identified as experiencing homelessness. That is 3.9% of total enrollment, or roughly one student in every classroom of 25.

The number had been climbing for most of the past 15 years. In 2010, Washington counted 13,729 homeless students, 1.3% of enrollment. By 2025, the count had more than tripled. Then, in 2026, it fell by nearly 12,000 students in a single year, the largest one-year drop on record. Whether that plunge reflects genuine improvement or a system losing its ability to count is the central question facing Washington's homeless education infrastructure.

Fifteen years of acceleration

The growth was not steady. From 2010 to 2018, Washington's homeless student count climbed from 13,729 to 35,490, a 159% increase over eight years fueled by rising housing costs across the Puget Sound corridor and expanding identification efforts by school districts. The number of districts reporting any homeless students grew from 181 to 267 over that same period.

COVID temporarily interrupted the count. During the 2020-21 school year, the number fell to 27,712, the lowest figure since 2014. But this was almost certainly an artifact of remote learning: when students are not physically in school buildings, the adults who typically identify housing instability cannot do their jobs.

The post-COVID rebound was swift and severe. Between the 2021 trough and the 2025 peak, Washington added 15,830 homeless students to its rolls over four consecutive years of growth, an average of nearly 4,000 per year. The 2024 increase of 5,255 was the largest single-year jump since 2011. By 2025, the count exceeded the pre-COVID peak by 8,052 students, or 23%.

Where the crisis concentrates

Homelessness among Washington students is not evenly distributed. In 2025, the top 10 districts accounted for 15,158 of the 41,775 homeless students reported at the district level, or 36.3%. The top five alone held 23.2%.

Federal Way^↗ led the state with 2,390 homeless students, 10.7% of its enrollment. Tacoma^↗ followed with 2,173 (7.5%), then Seattle^↗ with 1,998 (3.9%), Highline^↗ with 1,630 (9.0%), and Spokane with 1,507 (5.1%).

The rates in some smaller districts were even more striking. Tukwila^↗, a small district south of Seattle that serves a heavily immigrant community, reported 14.0% of its students as homeless in 2025. Eighty districts statewide had homeless rates above 5%, up from 20 in 2010.

The housing math behind the numbers

About three-quarters of Washington students identified as homeless are "doubled-up," meaning they share housing with another family because they cannot afford their own. This is the most common form of student homelessness under the federal McKinney-Vento Act definition, and it is driven directly by housing costs.

Washington's housing affordability gap is large and growing. A 2024 state housing report estimated the state has roughly 155,000 housing units affordable to low- and moderate-income households, against more than 540,000 eligible households. Chronic homelessness in the state surged 56% between 2023 and 2024 alone.

Jenny Allen, a McKinney-Vento family support worker overseeing homeless services at 24 Seattle schools, told KUOW that the pattern is straightforward:

"Families are continuing to be hit hard by inflation and often struggle to find and secure affordable housing." -- KUOW, Dec. 2024

Immigration has also played a role. Seattle Public Schools has seen increasing numbers of students from South American countries, Ukraine, and Afghanistan. Rogers Greene, a family support worker at Dunlap Elementary, told KUOW about the challenge for newly arrived families: "You're just dropped somewhere and then figure it out."

The 2026 cliff

Then came 2026. The statewide count dropped from 43,542 to 31,560, a decline of 11,982 students, or 27.5%. This is not a typical fluctuation. It is the largest single-year movement in either direction across the entire 17-year dataset.

The drop was not concentrated in a few districts. Federal Way fell from 2,390 to 865, a 63.8% decline. Tacoma dropped from 2,173 to 1,241 (down 42.9%). Bethel fell 45.3%. Wenatchee fell 53.7%. Across the state, 13 fewer districts reported any homeless students at all in 2026 compared to 2025.

There is no plausible housing-market explanation for a 28% one-year improvement. Washington rents did not fall by a quarter. Vacancy rates did not double. What did change was the infrastructure for counting.

A system under financial strain

During the 2025 legislative session, Washington's Homeless Student Stability Education Program (HSSeP) had its state funding cut by 76%, dropping to $1.2 million for the two-year budget cycle. The program, which funds identification, enrollment support, and housing coordination at the district level, had supported more than 13,000 people in 2024. After the cuts, that capacity was projected to fall by more than two-thirds.

Total district-level funding for homeless student services fell from $4.6 million in 2024-25 to $3.3 million in 2025-26. The federal McKinney-Vento Education for Homeless Children and Youth program, the only dedicated federal funding stream, faced its own existential threat: a proposed consolidation into a $2 billion block grant that would eliminate dedicated homeless student funding, replacing the current $129 million across 18 separate programs that together total $6.5 billion.

Building Changes, the Washington nonprofit that administers the state program, has been direct about the stakes:

"42,436 students in Washington's K-12 public schools were identified as experiencing homelessness... Without dedicated funding, schools may deprioritize support for homeless students when facing budget pressures." -- Building Changes

(That figure, from the 2022-23 OSPI annual report, reflects cumulative identification over the full school year. The enrollment snapshot counts used elsewhere in this article capture a point in time and are consistently lower.)

The mechanism is straightforward. McKinney-Vento identification depends on trained liaisons in school buildings who know what to look for: students sleeping in cars, families doubled up with relatives, unaccompanied youth moving between friends' couches. When liaison positions are cut or reduced to part-time, identification rates drop. The students do not become housed. They become uncounted.

The rate tells a different story than the count

Because Washington's total enrollment also declined modestly in 2026, the homeless share fell from 3.9% to 2.9%, returning to approximately the same rate as 2016 and 2022. But the 2016 rate was built on a decade of expanding identification capacity, with districts steadily adding liaison staff and training. The 2026 rate sits on the other side of that curve, after a year of significant funding reductions.

Washington ranked sixth nationally for total homeless students and fifth for the share of its student population experiencing homelessness as of 2023. The academic consequences are severe: homeless students in the state are less than half as likely to be proficient in math (15% vs. 41%) and English language arts (25% vs. 54%) compared to their housed peers, and their four-year graduation rate trails by 23 percentage points.

Federal Way's warning signal

Federal Way's trajectory deserves particular attention. In 2010, the district counted 164 homeless students, 0.7% of enrollment. By 2025, that number had reached 2,390, a 1,358% increase, pushing the rate to 10.7%. Then in 2026, the count collapsed to 865.

The scale of Federal Way's 2025 number, more than one in 10 students, suggests either an aggressive identification program that captured students other districts missed, or local housing conditions that deteriorated far faster than the regional average. The 2026 collapse, a 64% single-year drop, suggests the former explanation may be more likely. If identification capacity contracted, a count built on strong outreach would fall hardest.

The same pattern played out in Tacoma (down 42.9%), Bethel (down 45.3%), and Kennewick (down 42.6%). Districts that had the highest counts relative to their size experienced the steepest drops, which is consistent with a reduction in identification rather than a reduction in need.

Counting what we choose to see

The 2026 data will be the first test of whether Washington's homeless student count is a measure of housing instability or a measure of funding for people who count housing instability. If the 2027 count rebounds toward pre-cut levels even as housing conditions remain unchanged, the 2026 dip will confirm what the funding timeline suggests: the state briefly lost the ability to see students it had spent 15 years learning to find.

If it does not rebound, the question becomes harder. Either Washington's housing market genuinely improved for the state's lowest-income families in a single year, or the system lost enough capacity that it may take years to rebuild the identification infrastructure. Neither answer is reassuring.

The federal picture adds urgency. If McKinney-Vento's dedicated funding is absorbed into a block grant, the $2.1 million Washington receives annually from the program is not guaranteed. Combined with the state-level HSSeP cuts already in effect, the financial foundation for homeless student services would rest on district budgets that are themselves under pressure from flat or declining enrollment.

For the 31,560 students still counted, and the unknown number who are not, the arithmetic is unforgiving.

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

1 in 7 Washington Students Is Now an English Learner

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In Federal Way^↗, one in three students is learning English. Sixteen years ago, it was one in eight. The district did not move. The district did not change its boundaries. The students changed.

Across Washington, the English learner population has nearly doubled since 2010, climbing from 80,195 students (7.7% of enrollment) to 159,472 (14.5%) in 2025-26. That 98.9% increase dwarfs the 5.9% growth in total enrollment over the same period. The state now has one English learner for every seven students, up from one in 13. Those 79,277 additional students, a population larger than any single school district outside the top 10, represent one of the most consequential shifts in how Washington schools operate day to day.

Two corridors, one pattern

The growth landed unevenly. Two distinct geographies absorbed most of it: the agricultural Yakima Valley and the suburban ring south of Seattle.

In the Yakima Valley, English learners have long been present in large numbers, but the concentrations deepened. Bridgeport^↗ went from 27.9% to 57.4% EL. Wapato^↗ more than doubled its share, from 23.7% to 48.3%. Granger^↗ crossed the majority threshold at 51.5%. Thirteen Washington districts now have English learner shares above 40%, and most are agricultural communities in central and eastern Washington where seasonal labor and permanent settlement patterns overlap.

The South King County story is different in kind. These are not rural districts with long histories of farmworker families. Kent^↗, Federal Way, and Auburn^↗ were 12-15% EL in 2010. All three now exceed 30%. Highline^↗, already at 20.8%, climbed to 38.3%.

Kent went from 3,937 English learners to 8,076. Federal Way from 2,634 to 7,079, a 168.8% increase. Auburn nearly tripled, from 1,684 to 5,466. Tukwila^↗, already a gateway district in 2010 at 34.0% EL, now stands at 47.6%, making it the only suburban district in Washington where nearly half the student body is learning English.

The post-COVID acceleration

The trajectory was not constant. Three eras define it.

From 2010 to 2015, the state added 32,883 English learners, averaging more than 6,500 per year. Growth then decelerated from 2015 to 2019, adding 21,328 over four years. The COVID period from 2019 to 2022 nearly froze the count, with a net gain of just 2,099 students across three years, including a 3,190-student loss in 2021.

Then the trajectory broke upward. Between 2022 and 2025, Washington added 30,033 English learners in three years, roughly 10,000 per year, the fastest sustained growth in the 16-year dataset. This post-COVID surge pushed the EL share from 12.5% to 15.1%.

The 2025-26 school year reversed that momentum. The count dropped 7,066 students, from 166,538 to 159,472, the largest single-year decline on record. That dip warrants scrutiny: six districts that reported hundreds of English learners in 2024-25, including Ferndale (565), North Mason (441), and Omak (370), reported zero in 2025-26. Whether those drops reflect actual student departures, reclassification events, or reporting changes is not yet clear from the data alone.

A gap that keeps widening

Even with the 2026 dip, the divergence between English learner growth and total enrollment growth is striking. Indexed to 2010, total enrollment sits at 106, meaning the state has 5.9% more students than it did 16 years ago. English learner enrollment sits at 199, nearly double the baseline.

That gap has fiscal and operational implications that compound. Washington's Transitional Bilingual Instruction Program allocates supplemental funding for each eligible English learner based on a prototypical staffing model. But the staffing required to serve these students is harder to fund than it is to calculate. A 2023 joint report by PESB and OSPI found the state would continue to operate at a deficit, failing to produce the 260 to 390 bilingual educators necessary each year through 2025-26.

In many districts, paraeducators provide the majority of bilingual instruction, particularly in smaller and more rural systems. For a district like Yakima^↗, where one-third of its 5,063 English learners depend on these services, the gap between need and capacity is not abstract.

What moved the needle

Two forces plausibly explain most of the growth, and they are not the same force.

The first is new arrivals. Washington has historically ranked among the top 10 refugee resettlement states, and King County's foreign-born population crossed 500,000 in 2017, with nearly half of the county's population growth since 2010 coming from immigration. Over the past decade, more than 30,000 refugees from over 70 countries resettled in the state through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program alone. Students in Washington's TBIP program speak 285 different home languages, with Spanish the most common at 58.3%, followed by Russian, Ukrainian, Dari, Vietnamese, and Arabic.

The second is expanded identification. Reclassification criteria determine not just when students exit EL status but also, indirectly, how long they stay in the count. OSPI updated its exit criteria effective 2024, creating an alternative pathway for students in grades 3-12 who scored between 4.3 and 4.6 on WIDA and earned Level 3 or 4 on the SBA English language arts assessment. The 2026 dip of 7,066 students may partly reflect a reclassification cohort exiting under these new criteria, though the six districts that dropped to zero EL enrollment suggest reporting changes are also involved.

The data cannot distinguish between a student who arrived from another country and a student who was already enrolled but newly identified as an English learner. Both show up the same way in the annual count. This means the 98.9% increase over 16 years reflects some unknown mix of actual demographic change and evolving identification practices.

The suburban transformation no one planned for

South King County offers the clearest case study of how this growth reshaped districts that were not historically EL-serving systems.

"What we are seeing here is happening across the country: the suburbanization of the minority population, which also includes the suburbanization of immigration." -- Mark Ellis, University of Washington geography professor, in The Seattle Times

Kent, Federal Way, Auburn, and Highline collectively enrolled 11,941 English learners in 2010. In 2025-26, they enrolled 27,615, an increase of 15,674 students, accounting for 19.8% of the entire statewide EL gain. These four districts alone now serve more English learners than the bottom 277 of Washington's 328 districts combined.

The share increases tell the operational story. Auburn went from 11.7% to 30.3% EL. That means a district that once needed bilingual capacity for roughly one in nine students now needs it for nearly one in three. Every hiring decision, every curriculum adoption, every parent communication strategy changed over the span of a decade and a half.

Next year's telling number

The 2025-26 dip was the first meaningful decline in EL enrollment since the pandemic year of 2020-21, and it was larger in absolute terms. Whether it marks the beginning of a plateau or a one-year correction will be visible in next year's data.

The districts that dropped to zero EL enrollment, particularly Ferndale and North Mason, bear watching. If those students reappear in 2026-27 counts, the dip was likely a reporting artifact. If they do not, something structural changed.

For districts like Pasco^↗, where 35.8% of 18,834 students are English learners, the question is not whether demand for bilingual instruction will continue but whether the workforce pipeline can meet it. Washington's teacher preparation programs were producing fewer bilingual educators than needed even before the EL population surged past 150,000. At the current scale, every year of undersupply compounds.

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

White Students Now 47% of Washington's Schools

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 12:00:00 GMT

In the fall of 2022, for the first time in recorded history, white students made up less than half of Washington's public school enrollment. The threshold was crossed quietly: 49.9%, a fraction of a percentage point below the line. Four years later, the gap has widened to 47.1%, and there is no year in the 16-year dataset when the white share rose.

The crossing was not a single event but the visible point of a long structural shift. Washington lost 140,996 white students between 2010 and 2026, a 21.5% decline, while gaining 124,142 Hispanic students, 64,167 multiracial students, and 23,207 Asian students. The state's public schools are now more diverse than its general population, where non-Hispanic white residents still make up about 63% of the total.

Sixteen years, one direction

White enrollment fell every single year from 2010 to 2026. The losses ranged from as few as 792 students in 2017 to as many as 44,809 in 2021, the pandemic year. That single COVID-era drop accounted for 83.7% of the state's total enrollment loss that year, even though white students made up just 52.5% of enrollment beforehand. The disproportionate exit suggests that white families were far more likely than families of color to pull children from public schools during the pandemic, whether to private schools, homeschooling, or out of state.

The pre-pandemic pace was roughly 0.8 percentage points per year. COVID accelerated it to 1.5 points in 2021, then the rate partially stabilized: 0.5 to 0.8 points per year from 2023 to 2026. Even at the slower pace, white enrollment is falling by 4,000 to 10,000 students per year. In 2026 alone, Washington lost 9,955 white students, the largest decline since 2022.

An older, shrinking base

The white population decline in Washington schools reflects a broader demographic reality. The Seattle Times reported that the state's white population fell by more than 111,000 between 2020 and 2023 alone, driven by an age structure that produces fewer births and more deaths:

"White people had the highest median age in Washington, at 43.5 years in 2022. For all other groups, the median was below 40." — The Seattle Times, 2024

Washington's natural increase (births minus deaths) has fallen from 40,736 in 2010 to 17,654 in 2025, less than half its level 15 years ago. That decline is concentrated among white families: the aging white population has fewer children entering kindergarten each year, while immigration and higher birth rates among younger demographic groups push enrollment in the other direction.

Migration now accounts for roughly 70% of Washington's population growth. Much of that migration is international, feeding growth in Hispanic, Asian, and multiracial enrollment.

Who grew, who shrank

The composition shift is not a single story. Each group moved on its own trajectory.

Hispanic students added 124,142 to Washington's rolls over 16 years, a 74.1% increase that took their share from 16.2% to 26.6%. The growth was concentrated in central Washington's agricultural counties and in suburban districts ringing Seattle, Tacoma, and Vancouver. Pasco School District^↗ gained 4,100 Hispanic students. Evergreen (Clark)^↗ gained 3,777. Auburn^↗, Edmonds^↗, and Puyallup^↗ each added more than 2,700.

One signal warrants attention: Hispanic enrollment dipped by 3,417 students in 2026, the first non-COVID decline in the dataset. Whether this reflects a one-year anomaly or the beginning of a new pattern is not yet clear.

Multiracial students nearly tripled, from 35,867 to 100,034 (+178.9%). This is the fastest-growing category in absolute growth rate, though some of that growth reflects changes in how families identify their children rather than new arrivals. The multiracial share plateaued around 9.1% beginning in 2021, suggesting the reclassification wave may have stabilized.

Asian enrollment grew 28.9%, from 80,375 to 103,582, making Asian students the third-largest group at 9.4% of enrollment. Much of this growth tracks the broader expansion of the Seattle metro's Asian population, which grew by about 76,700 between 2020 and 2023.

Black enrollment was essentially flat, losing 1,279 students (-2.3%) over 16 years. The share ranged between 4.3% and 5.5%.

Native American enrollment fell by 12,146 students, a 49.0% decline that cut the group nearly in half. The steepest drop came between 2010 and 2011 (-6,952), which may partly reflect a reporting reclassification as multiracial categories expanded. Even excluding that first-year discontinuity, the group has been in steady decline.

The district map is splitting in two

In 2010, 48 of 300 Washington districts (16.0%) had student populations where white students were less than half. By 2026, that number had grown to 114 of 328 (34.8%). The 47 districts that crossed the threshold since 2010 include some of the state's largest: Seattle^↗, Lake Washington^↗, Puyallup^↗, Evergreen (Clark)^↗, Northshore^↗, Tacoma^↗, Edmonds^↗, and Issaquah^↗.

The pattern is geographic. Nearly every large suburban district in the Puget Sound corridor has crossed the line or is approaching it. Bellevue^↗, once 51.5% white, is now 23.4%, reshaped by the Eastside's technology-sector immigration. Kent^↗, already diverse in 2010 at 45.7% white, has dropped to 26.1%. Federal Way^↗ fell from 41.2% to 17.9%.

Eastern Washington tells a different story. Spokane^↗ remains 64.6% white. Mead^↗ is 78.2%. Battle Ground^↗ is 76.0%. The diversity transformation is concentrated on the western side of the Cascades and in the agricultural communities of the Yakima Valley and Columbia Basin.

A workforce that does not match

One operational consequence of the demographic shift: the gap between who teaches and who sits in the classroom. The Professional Educator Standards Board tracks the disparity and has noted that Washington's teacher workforce, while increasing in racial diversity, is not representative of the student body. An IES study of pathways to teaching found that candidates of color face disproportionate dropout rates at every step of the teacher preparation pipeline, from college admission through certification to employment.

Sharonne Navas of the Equity in Education Coalition told The Seattle Times that the milestone reflects a global pattern: "We're just falling in line with the rest of the world." David Knight, a University of Washington professor, suggested the shift should prompt a harder look at school finance: "Maybe this milestone is going to finally start to remind people that we should have a more tailored school finance system."

What the kindergarten pipeline signals

Washington's kindergarten class has shrunk from 82,947 in 2020 to 69,338 in 2026, a 16.4% drop. Over the same period, the 12th-grade class swelled from 91,196 to 98,754. The state is graduating large cohorts born in the mid-2000s, when Washington was still above 60% white, and replacing them with smaller kindergarten classes born after the birth rate decline accelerated and the demographic composition shifted further. Each year that passes widens the compositional gap between older and younger grades.

Washington's natural increase is at its lowest recorded level, and nothing in the birth data points toward a reversal. The 2027 kindergarten cohort, drawn from one of the state's lowest birth years on record, will be even more diverse than 2026's -- and even smaller.

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