In this series: Arizona 2025-26 Enrollment.

A year ago, Arizona's enrollment decline looked like it might be decelerating. The 2024 loss of 10,772 students was bad, but it was the same order of magnitude as 2023's loss of 6,920. The phrase "gradual erosion" appeared in more than one school board presentation.

Then the Arizona Department of Education published its 2025-26 enrollment figures, and gradual erosion became freefall: 1,073,531 public school students, down 25,998 from the prior year. That is a 2.4% single-year decline, nearly four times the loss three years earlier, and a new all-time low. Whatever floor people thought they saw last year was not a floor.

What the numbers open up

The enrollment data covers more than 600 districts and charter holders with breakdowns by grade level, race, ethnicity, and gender. Over the coming weeks, The AZEdTribune will unpack it in a series of data-driven articles. Here is what jumps out first.

The decline is accelerating, not stabilizing. Annual losses grew from 6,920 in 2023 to 10,772 in 2024 to 15,582 in 2025 to 25,998 in 2026. The state has now lost 72,026 students since its 2020 peak of 1,145,557, a 6.3% decline. At this pace, Arizona will drop below one million students before the end of the decade.

Mesa just hit rock bottom. The state's largest traditional district fell to 52,975 students, its lowest point in the data. Mesa has lost 9,515 students since 2020, a 15.2% decline. It is not alone: 211 Arizona districts are at their all-time enrollment lows.

One charter holder now enrolls more students than most districts. American Leadership Academy grew from 7,904 students in 2018 to 17,732 in 2026, a 124% increase during a period when the state lost 72,000 students overall. ALA's growth alone absorbed more students than all but four districts enroll.

By the numbers: 1,073,531 students statewide in 2025-26 — down 25,998 from the prior year, a 2.4% decline, the largest non-pandemic loss on record, and the lowest enrollment in at least nine years.

The threads we are following

Arizona is one school year from a Hispanic majority. Hispanic enrollment reached 49.2% in 2026 while white enrollment fell to 32.3%, down from 38.0% eight years ago. The state lost 76,000 white students since 2018. At current rates, Hispanic students will constitute the outright majority within one to two years.

Four inner-city districts lost nearly 15,000 students. Isaac Elementary, Glendale Elementary, Alhambra Elementary, and Cartwright Elementary — all serving predominantly low-income, majority-Hispanic communities in central Phoenix — have collectively lost 14,882 students since 2018. Isaac alone shrank 38.1%.

Two in three districts never recovered from COVID. Five years after the pandemic emptied 33,829 seats in a single year, only 33.2% of Arizona districts have returned to their 2020 enrollment levels. The districts that bounced back are almost exclusively fast-growing exurban communities. Everyone else is still losing.

What comes next

Each of these threads will get its own article with charts, district-level breakdowns, and context. New articles publish Thursdays. The first deep dive, next week, examines the full arc of Arizona's six-year freefall and what it means for school budgets.

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