Richland 01 - EdTribune SC - South Carolina Education Data

Nearly Half of SC Districts Hit Record Lows

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Richland 01^↗ enrolled 21,468 students this year. That is fewer than any year since at least 2014-15, a loss of 3,088 from its 12-year peak. It is not alone. Thirty-eight of South Carolina's 81 school districts recorded their lowest enrollment in at least a dozen years in 2025-26, and 64 of 81 declined. Only seven districts are at all-time highs. Two of those are charter operators.

The 2025-26 school year erased South Carolina's post-COVID recovery in a single stroke. The state dropped from 796,780 students to 789,086, a loss of 7,694 students (0.97%). That is the largest non-COVID decline in the data window. But the state-level figure understates how widespread the damage is: nearly four out of every five districts shrank, and the losses span every region of the state.

The districts that hit bottom

The 38 districts at record lows are not a homogeneous group. The list includes large suburban systems like Beaufort 01^↗ (20,819 students, down 7.0% from peak) and Lexington 05^↗ (16,452, down 6.0%), mid-sized districts like Sumter 01^↗ (13,314, down 22.6%), and rural districts that have been emptying for over a decade.

The deepest losses, measured as percentage decline from peak enrollment, concentrate along the I-95 Corridor. McCormick 01^↗ has lost 42.2% of its students since its 12-year high, falling from 835 to 483. Lee 01^↗ is down 42.1%. Williamsburg 01^↗ lost 41.6%, Allendale 01^↗ lost 40.3%, and Colleton 01^↗ lost 30.3%. These are the same communities named in the landmark Abbeville v. State of South Carolina lawsuit over education funding adequacy.

Six districts have declined every single year in the 12-year data window, an unbroken 11-year streak of losses: Colleton 01, Darlington 01^↗, Fairfield 01^↗, McCormick 01, Marion 10^↗, and Williamsburg 01. Three more districts are in 10-year decline streaks. For a district like McCormick, which now enrolls just 483 students, each year of further loss raises an existential question about whether the district can sustain independent operations.

The flippers: growth reversed overnight

Seventeen districts that grew in 2024-25 reversed course and declined in 2025-26. The largest flippers were among the state's biggest systems. Charleston 01^↗ gained 458 students last year and lost 800 this year. Horry 01^↗ gained 457 and lost 649. Berkeley 01^↗ gained 319 and lost 97. York 04^↗, a Charlotte-metro spillover district that grew 50.5% from 12,256 to 18,445 between 2015 and 2025, lost 321 students in a single year.

These are not rural systems in long-term decline. They are coastal and suburban districts that had been carrying the state's enrollment recovery. Their simultaneous reversal in 2025-26 signals something more structural than a one-year fluctuation.

Horry County, one of the fastest-growing counties in the nation with 3.8% population growth, is losing public school students even as residents pour in. Horry County Schools reported 3,353 student withdrawals since the start of the school year, with the largest share of departing families citing a desire for "more options."

Where the students went

The seven districts at all-time highs tell part of the story. Charter Institute at Erskine^↗ gained 2,362 students to reach 28,376, making it the fastest-growing district entity in the state. Limestone Charter Association^↗ added 1,263 to reach 8,650. SC Public Charter School District^↗ gained 732 to reach 22,115. Together, the three charter operators added 4,357 students in 2025-26, absorbing 57% of the 7,694-student net state loss.

Charter operator enrollment has grown from 17,024 in 2015 to 59,141 in 2026, a 247% increase. That growth accelerated sharply after 2020: charter operators enrolled 30,764 students in 2019-20 and nearly doubled to 59,141 by 2025-26.

The only traditional districts at all-time highs were Spartanburg 02^↗ (12,143), Spartanburg 05^↗ (11,230), Anderson 04^↗ (3,113), Spartanburg 04^↗ (3,007), and the Governor's School for Agriculture at John De La Howe (91 students). Three of the five are Spartanburg County subdivisions.

South Carolina's Education Scholarship Trust Fund, launched in 2024, adds another channel. All 10,000 scholarships for 2025-26 were awarded, each worth $7,500. The program cap rises to at least 15,000 for 2026-27, with eligibility expanding from 300% to 500% of the federal poverty level. Not every ESTF recipient is a former public school student, but the program's rapid scale-up coincides precisely with the sharpest enrollment contraction in the state's recent history.

Fiscal pressure follows the headcount

South Carolina funds districts through a weighted pupil formula tied to Average Daily Membership. When enrollment drops, state funding follows. Greenville 01^↗, the state's largest district at 76,398 students, lost 1,376 students in 2025-26 after losing 590 in 2024-25, back-to-back declines after years of growth. With more than 40% of local public school funding tied to headcount, those losses translate directly into fewer teaching positions.

"What this is, is a disparity in State Aid to Classroom funding that gives charter school students ten times more in new money than traditional public schools." -- Tim Waller, Greenville County Schools media director, Fox Carolina, May 2025

In the 2025-26 state budget, approximately $90 million in State Aid to Classrooms funding went to charter schools serving roughly 57,000 students, about $1,500 per student. Traditional districts serving roughly 710,000 students received approximately $22 million, about $30 per student. Charter leaders argue the disparity reflects their lack of access to local property tax revenue; traditional district leaders call it a structural inequity that compounds enrollment-driven funding losses.

The pipeline question

The 2025-26 reversal is hard to dismiss as a temporary correction. South Carolina's pre-COVID growth pattern was steady: the state added 30,203 students between 2015 and 2020, growing every year. COVID erased 20,250 of those students in a single year. The recovery was real, with the state clawing back to a peak of 796,780 by 2025. Then the 2025-26 cliff dropped enrollment below the 2023-24 level.

Sixty-four of 81 districts declined. The 17 that grew added a combined 5,279 students. The 64 that shrank lost 12,973. That 2.5-to-1 ratio between losses and gains means the state's enrollment trajectory now depends on whether charter operator growth can continue to offset traditional district losses, and whether the ESTF program accelerates the migration or merely absorbs students who would have left anyway.

The distinction matters for districts like Sumter 01, which has declined for 10 consecutive years, losing 3,878 students (22.6%) from its peak. For a district already at its smallest, another year of loss does not simply shrink the budget proportionally. It creates per-student cost increases as fixed costs for transportation, facilities, and administration spread across fewer students.

The number of districts at record lows spiked to 62 during COVID's nadir in 2020-21, then fell to 33 by 2022-23 as recovery took hold. It has now climbed back to 38 and rising, without a pandemic to blame.

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

South Carolina's Recovery Is Over

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

South Carolina spent four years clawing back every student it lost to COVID. It recovered 148% of its pandemic losses, surpassing its pre-pandemic enrollment and reaching a record 796,780 students in 2024-25. Then, in a single year, it gave back 7,694 of them.

The state now enrolls 789,086 students, a 1.0% decline that is both the largest non-COVID drop in the dataset and the only decline year outside the pandemic since records begin in 2014-15. South Carolina never reached 800,000. It came within 3,220 students of that milestone and turned around.

Four recovery years, then a cliff

The trajectory is worth spelling out. South Carolina grew steadily from 756,866 in 2014-15 to 787,069 in 2019-20, adding 30,203 students at roughly 5,000 to 8,000 per year. COVID cut 20,250 students in a single year, dropping enrollment to 766,819. The state bounced back with a 14,412-student surge in 2021-22, the strongest single-year gain in the dataset, followed by three more years of growth: 8,000, then 4,320, then 3,229.

Each year of recovery was smaller than the last. The deceleration was visible by 2023-24, when gains dropped below 5,000 for the first time since the rebound began. By 2024-25, growth had slowed to 3,229 students, 0.4%. Then 2025-26 arrived with a loss of 7,694, larger than any two consecutive recovery years combined.

The state remains 2,017 students above its 2019-20 pre-COVID level. But it sits 35,479 below where the pre-COVID growth trajectory (2014-15 through 2019-20) would have placed it, a gap that widened in 2025-26.

The pipeline is shrinking

The most likely driver of the reversal is demographic, not pandemic-related. Kindergarten enrollment has fallen 9.2% since 2014-15, from 58,359 to 52,969. Grade 12, meanwhile, has grown 21.7%, from 45,626 to 55,515. In 2024-25, for the first time in the dataset, South Carolina enrolled more 12th graders than kindergartners. The K-to-G12 ratio dropped from 127.9 in 2014-15 to 95.4 in 2025-26.

This is a pipeline problem. Large graduating classes are leaving the system faster than smaller incoming cohorts can replace them. First grade is down 7.3% over the period, second grade down 5.8%. Every grade from third through 12th has grown. The system is top-heavy, and each year of 12th-grade departures removes a larger cohort than the kindergarten class entering at the bottom.

South Carolina's fertility rate fell to 55.8 per 1,000 women aged 15-44 in 2023, continuing a national trend of declining births. Children born in 2019-20, when South Carolina's child care crisis was already deepening, are now entering kindergarten. The shrinking pipeline is not unique to South Carolina, but the state's abrupt reversal from growth to decline makes the structural shift harder to absorb.

61 districts lost students. Three charter operators gained.

The 2025-26 decline hit 61 of the state's 81 districts. Only 16 gained students, and just 10 of those are traditional districts.

Greenville 01^↗, the state's largest district, led the losses with 1,376 fewer students, a 1.8% decline. Charleston 01^↗ lost 800, Horry 01^↗ lost 649, and Darlington 01^↗ lost 609, a 6.9% drop that stands out for its severity in a mid-sized district enrolling just over 8,000. The five largest losses accounted for 32.7% of the total decline.

Greenville County Schools has now lost students for two consecutive years, down from a peak of 78,364 in 2023-24. The district has attributed some of the decline to charter competition, with 6,113 Greenville County students enrolled in charter schools, alongside a drop in kindergarten enrollment and a decline in students with limited English proficiency.

The three charter operators, by contrast, added a combined 4,357 students. Charter Institute at Erskine^↗ grew by 2,362 (9.1%), Limestone Charter Association by 1,263 (17.1%), and SC Public Charter School District by 732 (3.4%). Charter operators accounted for 7.5% of total enrollment in 2025-26, up from 2.2% in 2014-15.

Charter growth and the zero-sum question

Charter enrollment has more than tripled since 2014-15, rising from 17,024 to 59,141. Traditional district enrollment has moved in the opposite direction, declining from 739,842 to 729,945 over the same period, a loss of 9,897 students even as the state total grew by 32,220.

The charter share chart shows a discontinuity in 2021-22, when SC Public Charter School District did not report enrollment and Limestone Charter Association had not yet been established as a separate reporting entity. The 3.1% figure for that year understates the charter sector's actual size.

Whether charter growth is pulling students from traditional districts or absorbing students who would otherwise leave public education entirely is an open question. Both dynamics are plausible. The Charter Institute at Erskine serves 26 schools and 27,000 students and has positioned itself as the fastest-growing district-equivalent entity in the state, with 2,800 additional students in its approved new-school pipeline. At its current growth rate, the Institute alone will enroll more students than all but three traditional districts in the state.

Separately, the state's Education Scholarship Trust Fund awarded 10,000 scholarships of $7,500 each for 2025-26, enabling families to use state funds for private school tuition and other educational expenses. The program is set to expand to 15,000 scholarships in 2026-27, with eligibility reaching 500% of the federal poverty level, roughly 85% of South Carolina children. Whether the ESA program has materially affected public school enrollment is not yet clear from the data. A one-year, 7,694-student decline in a system of 789,086 could reflect ESA departures, pipeline shrinkage, or both.

Nearly half of all districts at a record low

Thirty-nine of the state's 81 districts, 48.1%, are at their lowest enrollment in the 12-year dataset. The list spans rural districts that have been declining for years, like Darlington 01 and Marlboro 01, and larger districts that peaked more recently, like Richland 01^↗ at 21,468 and Lexington 05 at 16,452.

Only 17 of the 71 districts that lost students during COVID, 23.9%, have recovered to their pre-pandemic levels. South Carolina's statewide recovery masked the fact that most districts never fully recovered, and 2025-26 pushed many further from their pre-COVID baselines.

"Enrollment declines will hurt rural districts the hardest. Marlboro County isn't going to be the last district that faces this demographic problem." — Post and Courier, editorial

South Carolina's Education Finance Act formula distributes state funds based on weighted pupil units. When enrollment drops, funding follows. For districts like Darlington, which lost 6.9% in a single year, the fiscal adjustment is not gradual. It is immediate.

What to watch next

The 2026-27 kindergarten cohort was born in 2020-21, when U.S. births dropped sharply. If that cohort is smaller than the current one, the decline accelerates. Meanwhile, the ESA program's expansion to 15,000 scholarships creates a second source of potential outflow from public schools.

South Carolina spent four years proving that a state can fully recover from COVID enrollment losses. It took one year to prove that recovery and long-term growth are different things.

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