Lake Stevens - EdTribune WA - Washington Education Data

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.

61 Washington Districts Hit All-Time Lows

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT

For three years, Washington's public schools were clawing their way back. From the COVID trough of 1,091,343 students in 2021-22, enrollment ticked upward: 5,352, then 3,364, then 5,325. The state had recovered about 14,000 of the 55,539 students it lost when the pandemic hit. Then 2025-26 arrived and took back most of it. Washington shed 9,099 students in a single year, dropping to 1,096,285, lower than any non-COVID year since 2015 and just 4,942 above the 2022 trough. Only 8.9% of the COVID-era loss has been recovered, and 61 districts now sit at the lowest enrollment in the 17-year data series.

That is the most all-time lows recorded in any year since tracking began in 2009-10. By comparison, just 13 districts were at record lows the year before, and the previous worst year was 2021, when the pandemic pushed 39 districts to their floors. The 2026 figure is 56% higher than even that crisis year.

The asymmetry of decline

The 61 districts at all-time lows collectively enroll 136,140 students, 12.4% of the state total. On the other side of the ledger, 46 districts hit all-time highs in 2026, but they account for only 57,645 students, 5.3% of the state. The math is lopsided: shrinking districts are more than twice as large as growing ones.

The largest district at all-time high is Lake Stevens^↗ at 10,276 students. After that, the list drops quickly: Cheney (5,750), Ridgefield (4,367), Lynden (3,679). Two of the "all-time high" districts, Goldendale (3,163) and South Bend (2,066), are inflated by virtual schools housed under their enrollment codes. Goldendale hosts Connections Academy, which accounts for roughly 2,300 of its students. South Bend jumped from around 650 students to 2,066 in two years, a pattern consistent with virtual program placement rather than families moving to town.

The record-low districts, by contrast, include Evergreen (Clark)^↗ at 21,903 students, Vancouver^↗ at 21,304, and Marysville^↗ at 9,672. These are not small rural districts cycling through demographic noise. They are mid-to-large suburban systems losing hundreds of students per year.

Where the students went

Thirty-eight of the 61 all-time lows are new this year: districts that were not at their floor in 2025 but crossed it in 2026. The remaining 23 have been at or near their minimum for multiple years, unable to reverse the slide.

Evergreen (Clark)^↗ has lost 4,678 students since its 2013 peak of 26,581, a 17.6% decline. Vancouver^↗ peaked more recently, in 2017 at 23,917, and has shed 2,613 (10.9%). Marysville^↗ peaked earliest, in 2010, and has lost 2,181 students (18.4%) since. Smaller districts show steeper percentage losses: East Valley (Spokane) is down 25.4% from its 2012 peak, and Toppenish has fallen 23.8% from 2017.

Statewide, 63.6% of districts lost enrollment between 2025 and 2026. Only 113 of 327 districts with data for both years gained students. The 10 largest single-year losses alone total 4,263 students, led by Vancouver (-639), Kennewick (-500), Lake Washington (-492), Issaquah (-478), and Bethel (-468).

Birth rates, housing costs, and the funding cliff

The most widely cited driver is demographic: Washington's birth rate has fallen roughly 8% since 2016, from 90,505 births to 83,838, a steeper drop than the 7% national average. Those smaller birth cohorts are now flowing through elementary grades. Lisa Guthrie, board president of Lake Washington School District, attributed the enrollment shifts directly, telling the Sammamish Independent that the decline reflects "a decline in birth rate in the late 2010s and the lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic."

The pandemic itself created a separate, compounding loss. Washington's public schools have recovered only 8.9% of the 55,539 students lost between 2020 and 2022. Many never came back: homeschool enrollment in Washington climbed by roughly 9,000 students, a 43% increase, while private school enrollment jumped by nearly 17,000, a 26% increase between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years. The pandemic accelerated a departure that has not reversed.

"If you are in a community and they are considering closing your elementary school, it is personal to you. It is very visceral, it is very powerful for you." — State Superintendent Chris Reykdal, The Seattle Times

Housing costs offer a third, less quantified explanation. Demographer Eric Hovee told The Columbian that "the enrollment drops are greatest in the school districts that aren't getting much new single-family residential development, coupled with declining birth rates." Clark County's median home sale price reached $380,000 by 2019 and has climbed since, pricing young families out of established suburbs. The districts that are growing, Ridgefield, La Center, and Deer Park, are precisely those outer-ring communities absorbing displaced families. But the students arriving in smaller districts do not replace the students leaving larger ones.

School closures are already underway

The fiscal consequences are tangible. Washington funds schools on a per-pupil basis, so every departing student takes state dollars with them. Evergreen Public Schools has faced a roughly $20 million budget deficit for three consecutive years, proposing to cut 140 positions in 2024-25 alone. Superintendent John Boyd was blunt: "Ninety cents of a dollar goes to staff. There's no way to reduce $20 million without affecting staff."

Marysville, which has fallen from 11,853 to 9,672 students since 2010, closed an elementary and a middle school for the 2025-26 year, targeting $2.4 million in annual savings. The state assigned a special administrator to oversee the district's finances. Seattle Public Schools proposed closing up to 21 schools to address a nearly $100 million budget shortfall before ultimately abandoning the plan, leaving the structural deficit unresolved.

The expiration of $2.6 billion in federal pandemic relief funds compounds the enrollment-driven squeeze. Districts that used one-time money to maintain staffing levels during the enrollment dip now face a double cliff: fewer students and less emergency aid simultaneously.

A bifurcated landscape

The size distribution of record-low districts reveals a pattern. Among districts with 1,000 to 5,000 students, 23 are at all-time lows and only 11 are at all-time highs. Among districts with 5,000 or more students, six are at lows and just two are at highs. The decline is concentrated where it costs the most: mid-sized districts with fixed overhead in buildings, administration, and specialized staff that cannot easily scale down.

Small districts under 500 students split evenly, 24 at lows and 24 at highs. Demographic fluctuations at that scale can swing a district from record to record on the arrival or departure of a few dozen families.

One data caveat: the 17-year window (2010-2026) means "all-time low" reflects the lowest point in the available series, not necessarily the lowest enrollment a district has ever seen. A district that was smaller in 2005 but grew before 2010 would not show 2010 as its minimum. The metric captures the direction of the current era, not a district's full history.

61 districts, one question

Washington's 2026 reversal raises a specific question: was it a one-year correction in an otherwise recovering trajectory, or the start of a new decline phase? The answer depends on whether the kindergarten cohorts entering in 2027 and 2028, born during Washington's lowest birth years on record, are large enough to offset the 12th-graders leaving. In Lake Washington School District, elementary enrollment has fallen 14.3% since 2019 while high school enrollment has risen 16.9%. That inversion will resolve itself within a few years, one way or the other.

For the 61 districts now at their floor, the operational question is whether to consolidate proactively or wait for the next year's count. Marysville and Evergreen have already made their cuts. The remaining 59 face the same arithmetic.

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