American Leadership Academy - EdTribune AZ - Arizona Education Data

Two in Three Arizona Districts Never Recovered From COVID

Fri, 29 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Part of the Arizona Enrollment Series. Updated weekly.

Correction (May 29, 2026): An earlier version of this article reported district-recovery figures computed against an outdated data extract. Every district-level count and the loss/gain/gap arithmetic have been recomputed against the current Arizona Department of Education data and corrected, including the headline figure (now 71,505 students). The state totals and named-district numbers were unaffected.

Only 191 of Arizona's 576 school districts have regained their pre-pandemic enrollment. Five years after COVID emptied classrooms across the state, two out of three districts are still underwater, and the share that has recovered is actually shrinking, from 38.2% in 2024 to 33.2% in 2026.

The bounce that wasn't

The post-COVID recovery lasted exactly one year. In 2022-23, enrollment dropped by 6,920. The next year: 10,772. Then 15,582. Then 25,998, the largest single-year loss outside the pandemic itself. The losses have accelerated by roughly half again each year. The 2025-26 decline of 25,998 students is the steepest non-pandemic decline in the dataset; only the 2020-21 COVID shock, when the state lost 33,829 students in a single year, was larger.

At the district level, the recovery picture is bleaker. Only 191 of 576 districts, 33.2%, have returned to their 2020 enrollment levels. That share peaked at 38.2% in 2024 before sliding backward. Nearly three out of four Arizona students now attend a district that is smaller than it was before the pandemic.

The damage is concentrated at the top. Among the 55 districts with 5,000 or more students in 2020, only 13, or 23.6%, have recovered. Every one of Arizona's 10 largest districts is smaller than it was before the pandemic. Together, those 10 lost 48,566 students, two-thirds of the statewide shortfall, on a combined base of roughly 365,000.

Where 71,505 students went

The arithmetic is lopsided. Districts that shrank lost a combined 133,473 students since 2020. Districts that grew added 61,968. The 71,505-student gap represents students who left the public enrollment system entirely, a population larger than Chandler Unified's current enrollment.

Mesa Unified leads the losses at 9,515 students, a 15.2% decline that has forced the district to lay off 400 employees and eliminate another 150 positions by the end of 2025-26. Tucson Unified lost 6,240 (13.8%), prompting Superintendent Gabriel Trujillo to tell his governing board in December that the district is in a fight for survival.

"We are in a do-or-die struggle for enrollment. We have to think big and we have to fire big." -- Tucson Unified Superintendent Gabriel Trujillo, AZ Luminaria, Dec. 2025

Chandler Unified (-5,851, -12.9%) and Paradise Valley Unified (-5,839, -18.9%) round out the top four. Washington Elementary, a K-8 district in central Phoenix, has lost nearly one in five students since 2020, a 19.8% decline that erased 4,436 seats.

Among the gainers, the names are telling. American Leadership Academy, a charter network, added 7,767 students (+77.9%). Queen Creek Unified, an outer-ring suburb absorbing new housing, added 5,998 (+63.7%). ASU Preparatory Academy Digital, a virtual school, grew from 611 to 4,277 students. The pattern: growth is concentrated in charters, virtual schools, and exurban communities on the metro fringe.

Falling off a cliff, or walking off one

Three forces are converging on Arizona's enrollment. The question that divides education politics in the state is which one matters most.

The most structurally durable factor is demographic. Arizona births peaked at over 102,000 in 2007 and have fallen 36% since then. Kindergarten enrollment in the state data has dropped from 81,305 in 2019-20 to 66,935 in 2025-26, a 17.7% decline that locks in smaller cohorts for the next 12 years. Glenn Farley of the Common Sense Institute Arizona has noted the pipeline effect.

"Every kindergarten class for the past decade has been smaller than the one before." -- Glenn Farley, Common Sense Institute Arizona, KJZZ, Jan. 2025

Mesa Public Schools has cited an 18% statewide decline in birth rates over the last decade and a 28% decline within the city of Mesa specifically.

The second force is Arizona's universal Empowerment Scholarship Account program. Since eligibility expanded to all students in 2022, participation has grown from roughly 12,000 to nearly 100,000 students, at an annual cost exceeding $1 billion. Between fiscal years 2024 and 2025 alone, more than 5,000 students left public district schools for the ESA program. However, roughly 71% of universal ESA participants were already in private school or homeschool before receiving the voucher, complicating any simple narrative about ESA as a drain on public enrollment.

The third force is charter expansion. The enrollment data cannot distinguish charter from traditional district students (azschooldata has no charter flag), but the top gainers list is suggestive: charter networks like American Leadership Academy and Academy of Mathematics and Science South account for several of the largest growth stories, even as traditional districts contract.

Birth rates alone do not explain why 2026's loss was nearly four times larger than 2023's. ESA alone does not explain it either, since 71% of voucher recipients were not in public schools to begin with. The most likely explanation is that all three forces are compounding, each one slightly accelerating the others, with no single factor dominant enough to reverse by addressing it alone.

The fell-back 77

Perhaps the most telling detail is what happened to districts that thought they had recovered. Of 209 districts that returned to their 2020 enrollment levels by 2022, 77 have since fallen back below the line. Phoenix Union High School District was 306 students above its pre-COVID mark in 2022. By 2026, it was 3,854 below it. Florence Unified, J.O. Combs Unified, and Glendale Union High School District followed the same arc: brief recovery, then sustained decline.

This fell-back cohort underscores that the bounce in 2022 was a return to school, not a return to growth. Families who came back after COVID closures did not stay, or were not replaced by the next cohort of kindergartners.

Closures and layoffs follow the money

Per-pupil funding follows students in Arizona. When enrollment drops, revenue drops the following year. An Arizona Auditor General report found that one-third of the state's school districts are now at "increased financial risk" due to declining enrollment and the funding losses that come with it.

The operational fallout is already visible. More than 20 Valley schools have closed or are closing since 2025. Kyrene Elementary District, down 24.2% since 2020, voted to close six schools over two years, projecting $5.8 million in annual savings to cover most of a $6.7 million budget shortfall. Paradise Valley Unified has already closed three campuses. Chandler Unified approved over 100 position cuts. Roosevelt Elementary District closed five schools in December 2025.

The distribution of outcomes is skewed heavily toward loss. Of 576 districts with data in both years, 385 lost enrollment. Among those, 262, nearly half of all Arizona districts, lost more than 10%. Only 189 districts grew at all, and about one in five of those gained less than 5%.

What the kindergarten pipeline signals

The state cannot outgrow its birth cohorts. Kindergarten enrollment has fallen every year since 2022's partial bounce, from 78,898 to 66,935 in 2025-26. Grade 12 enrollment, by contrast, peaked at 98,216 in 2024-25 before ticking down slightly to 98,012. Arizona is graduating far larger classes than it is enrolling. Until that pipeline inverts, total enrollment will continue to fall regardless of what happens with ESA, charter growth, or migration.

Arizona's largest districts are not waiting for enrollment to recover. They are planning for a system that will be permanently smaller, funded for fewer students, and operating in buildings designed for cohorts that no longer exist.

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

One Charter Holder Now Enrolls 17,732 Students

Fri, 01 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Part of the Arizona Enrollment Series. Updated weekly.

American Leadership Academy added 2,466 students last year. That single-year gain is larger than the total enrollment of 86% of Arizona's school districts. It is also the largest annual gain in ALA's nine years of state enrollment data, and it arrived in a year when the state as a whole lost 25,998 students.

ALA now enrolls 17,732 students across 15 campuses in the Phoenix metro area, making it Arizona's 12th-largest district-level entity. It is larger than Queen Creek Unified, larger than the Glendale Union High School District, and larger than every district in southern Arizona except Tucson Unified. Eight years ago, it enrolled 7,904.

The trajectory

The growth has not been steady. It has accelerated. Between 2018 and 2022, ALA averaged 758 new students per year. Between 2022 and 2026, that average more than doubled to 1,698 per year. The 2025-26 gain of 2,466 students, a 16.2% year-over-year jump, is the steepest in ALA's dataset.

The acceleration follows a pattern visible in ALA's finances. In October 2024, the organization closed a $201.6 million bond deal to acquire its Mesa North campus, complete construction on a performing arts center, and refinance prior debt. The bond prospectus projected enrollment reaching 25,000 by fiscal year 2028, which would require adding roughly 3,600 students per year for two more years.

At that scale, ALA would surpass Paradise Valley Unified (25,027), currently Arizona's seventh-largest district, and rival Deer Valley Unified (31,150) for fifth.

A single entity outpacing whole networks

What makes ALA unusual is not just its size but its organizational structure. Legacy Traditional Schools, the largest charter network in Arizona by combined enrollment, serves 20,585 students, but it does so across 21 separately chartered entities. BASIS Schools operates 22 entities enrolling 14,828 students combined. ALA's 17,732 students flow through one charter holder operating 15 campuses.

As a single charter holder, ALA accounted for 12.7% of all enrollment growth among Arizona's 211 growing districts between 2018 and 2026. One entity, one-eighth of the growth. Its share of total state enrollment has risen from 0.71% to 1.65% in eight years.

Who ALA enrolls

ALA's student body is 62.9% white in a state where white students make up 32.3% of total enrollment, a 30.6 percentage-point gap. Hispanic students, who represent 49.2% of Arizona's enrollment statewide, account for 24.4% of ALA's students.

The gap is narrowing. ALA's white share has fallen 12.7 percentage points since 2018, when it stood at 75.6%. Its Hispanic enrollment has quadrupled from 1,079 to 4,321 students, a 300.5% increase that far outpaces the network's overall 124.3% growth rate. But the convergence is slow: at the current pace, ALA's white share would not reach the state average for decades.

ALA's demographic profile resembles the East Valley suburbs where its campuses cluster. Queen Creek Unified is 61.9% white. Higley Unified is 58.9% white. Gilbert Unified is 55.4% white. ALA's 62.9% falls within the range of its host communities, which suggests the network's demographics partially reflect geography rather than selective enrollment.

Separately, ALA's service populations tell a different story. Students who are English learners make up 1.9% of ALA's enrollment compared to 10.3% statewide. Students with special needs account for 10.8% versus 14.3% statewide. Students who are economically disadvantaged represent 36.3% of ALA's enrollment versus 52.1% across Arizona. (The statewide figure jumped roughly 11 percentage points in 2024-25 due to a Community Eligibility Provision reporting change, so the gap may be overstated.) These gaps are common among high-growth charter operators and can reflect differences in the families who seek out charter schools, differences in identification practices, or both. The data does not distinguish between the two.

How ALA fits into Arizona's school choice landscape

ALA's growth is happening inside a school choice ecosystem unlike any other in the country. Arizona's Empowerment Scholarship Account program has grown to 92,362 participants as of September 2025, with a projected cost exceeding $1 billion in fiscal year 2026. The ESA program primarily draws families already outside the traditional public system: roughly 71% of universal ESA participants were previously in private school or homeschool, not public school.

The families choosing ALA are making a different choice. They are staying within the public system but selecting a charter operator that, according to its founding mission, provides education "in a moral and wholesome environment." ALA is tuition-free and open-enrollment, operating under the same state testing and accountability requirements as any traditional district.

The growth also coincides with East Valley suburbanization. Queen Creek's population grew 8.1% between 2023 and 2024, the fastest rate in the East Valley. New rooftops mean new families, and ALA has been opening campuses to meet them. But population growth alone does not explain why ALA is growing while Queen Creek Unified, in the same geography, grew 117.2% over the same period. Both are absorbing the suburban boom. ALA is doing it under a single charter.

Research on Arizona charter demographics has found persistent patterns.

"Enrollment data show the schools don't match the school age demographics of the state and, in many cases, their neighborhoods." -- Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, Feb 2016

ASU researcher Jeanne Powers has documented that Arizona school segregation has increased over the past 25 years even as the student population has diversified, with white students attending schools that are disproportionately white relative to their share of total enrollment. That pattern is not unique to charters. It mirrors residential sorting across the Phoenix metro, where housing prices and development patterns concentrate demographic groups by community.

What the data shows and doesn't

The data shows ALA growing fast and enrolling a whiter, more affluent, and less linguistically diverse student body than Arizona's average. It does not show why individual families choose ALA over their neighborhood school. The network's low English learner rate (1.9% vs. 10.3% statewide) could reflect that non-English-speaking families are less likely to navigate the charter application process, that ALA's campuses are located in areas with fewer immigrant families, or that ALA's instructional model does not prioritize bilingual services. All three are plausible; none is confirmed by the enrollment data alone.

The bond market, at least, is confident. ALA's October 2024 bond sale attracted more than 50 investors and achieved what Baird described as "the lowest interest rate spreads to the tax exempt market index achieved for a non-rated charter school bond nationwide since January 2023." Whether ALA reaches 25,000 students by 2028, as its financials project, depends on whether the East Valley keeps building and whether families keep choosing a single charter operator over the traditional districts next door.

Arizona lost 72,026 students between 2020 and 2026. ALA gained 7,767 over that same span. One entity, one-eighth of the growth, in a system that is contracting everywhere else.

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