Highline - EdTribune WA - Washington Education Data

The Hispanic-White Attendance Gap Nearly Doubled After COVID in Washington

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Before the pandemic, the attendance gap between Hispanic and white students in Washington was modest and stable. In the 2018-19 school year, 18.3% of Hispanic students were chronically absent compared to 13.4% of white students — a difference of 4.9 percentage points. It was a gap, but a manageable one, the kind that school districts could plausibly address with targeted outreach and bilingual family liaisons.

Five years later, that gap has nearly doubled to 8.9 points. One in three Hispanic students — 33.1%, or 96,339 children — is now chronically absent. The pandemic did not merely widen the Hispanic-white attendance gap. It shifted the baseline.

A gap that grew faster than any other

The widening followed a distinctive pattern. In 2020-21, as schools reopened after remote learning, the gap exploded to 12.1 points — Hispanic chronic absenteeism surged to 26.7% while white rates rose to just 14.6%. The most plausible explanation is structural: Hispanic families in Washington are disproportionately represented in essential-worker occupations, have higher rates of multigenerational housing, and face language barriers that made navigating return-to-school protocols more difficult.

When overall rates spiked to their peak in 2021-22, the gap actually narrowed to 10.3 points as white chronic absenteeism belatedly caught up. Since then, both groups have improved, but not at the same pace. White students have recovered 6.0 of the 16.8 points they lost (35.7%). Hispanic students have recovered 7.4 of their 22.2-point spike (33.3%). In absolute terms, Hispanic students improved more. In relative terms, they fell further behind.

The largest racial equity shift in the state

The Hispanic-white gap widened by 4.0 percentage points between 2019 and 2025, the largest increase of any racial group. The Native American-white gap grew by 3.9 points. By contrast, the Black-white gap actually narrowed by 0.4 points, and the Asian-white gap widened in Asian students' favor (Asian students are now 7.4 points below the white rate, compared to 5.2 points before COVID).

This is not a story about all students of color falling behind equally. It is specifically a Hispanic story, driven by the intersection of economic vulnerability, language access, and the particular way COVID disrupted working-class immigrant communities.

Where the crisis concentrates

At the district level, Hispanic chronic absenteeism rates above 40% are common in South Puget Sound and southwest Washington. Highline^↗ (7,658 Hispanic students) posts a 43.1% chronic rate. Tacoma^↗ (6,847 Hispanic students) reports 42.8%. Cheney, Lakewood, Bellingham, and Burlington-Edison all exceed 40%.

The districts with the lowest Hispanic chronic rates share a profile: small, rural, and with strong community ties. Quillayute Valley^↗ has just a 5.5% chronic rate among its 1,155 Hispanic students. Goldendale reports 12.9%. Omak, in the Okanogan Valley, posts 17.2%.

The urban-rural divide suggests that the attendance crisis among Hispanic students is not purely a cultural or linguistic problem. It is a structural one — concentrated in the large, complex school systems where the barriers to attendance are highest and the relationship between school and family is most attenuated.

96,339 students

The human scale matters. In 2024-25, Washington had 291,183 Hispanic students, up from 260,963 before the pandemic. The Hispanic share of total enrollment has grown from 23.4% to 26.7% — meaning the population group with the second-highest chronic absenteeism rate is also the fastest-growing segment of the student body.

If the Hispanic chronic rate had stayed at its pre-COVID level of 18.3%, roughly 43,000 fewer Hispanic students would be chronically absent today. Instead, 96,339 are — a number that has barely declined from the 110,500 peak despite three years of statewide recovery.

The gap is not closing

The trajectory since 2022 is discouraging. The Hispanic-white gap went from 10.3 points in 2022 to 9.3 in 2023, 9.2 in 2024, and 8.9 in 2025. That is narrowing, but at a pace of less than half a point per year. At this rate, Washington would not return to the pre-pandemic gap of 4.9 points until 2034.

Washington's attendance recovery strategies have been largely universal in design — targeted at all students, not at the communities where the crisis is most acute. The gap-narrowing pace of less than half a point per year is an answer of sorts: universal approaches are not closing a disparity this large. At 96,339 students, this is no longer a gap. It is a parallel attendance system, split along lines of language and income.

Data source

Data from the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. Analysis covers 2014-15 through 2024-25. The 2019-20 school year is excluded due to COVID-related attendance tracking anomalies.

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.