1. Districts can be categorized in a variety of ways to understand the implications of ESSER III funding expiring in the Fall of 2024. For example, from this blog post from September we looked at districts with over 10,000 students that received the highest amount of dollars per student. This week we look at the concentration of ESSER III spending across K-12 districts.
In the chart below we ranked districts by total ESSER III allocation and show the cumulative ESSER III funds allocated, district count, and enrollment count. For the district percentage denominator we used 17,477, which is the NCES total for K-12 districts including independent charters. It is worth noting there is a very long tail of smaller districts which make up only a tiny fraction of K-12 enrollment.
Districts with the five largest ESSER III allocations received roughly 10% of ESSER III money sent to LEAs, while the top 30 districts received 20% of the funding, etc. As you can see on the right, the growth in number of students in these districts begins to match the growth in cumulative ESSER III allocation by the time you get to the 40th percentile.
2. In a newsletter from January we looked at K-12 districts in the Top 500 that had experienced the fastest declines going back to 2018/19. This week we highlight the fifteen fastest growing districts during that period from the Top 500, and note the heavy concentration from Texas:
3. To date 27 states have announced enrollment for the 2022/23 academic year. Below is the change from 2021/22 by locale type:
4. Below is the shift by grade. As noted in our post titled "The Class of 2034" we are seeing a rise in first grade enrollment. The tenth grade enrollment increase is due to certain states holding back students two year ago: