In this series: Wisconsin 2025-26 Enrollment.

A year ago, Wisconsin's enrollment decline was settling into a pattern that almost looked manageable. The state had lost 8,802 students in 2023-24, a bad number, but it followed the 25,024-student collapse of the COVID year and administrators could frame it as aftershock. The 2024-25 school year ended with 814,002 students, and the question was whether the floor was close.

Then the Department of Public Instruction updated WISEdash with certified 2025-26 enrollment, and the answer was clear: 805,881 students, down 8,121 from the prior year. That is the second-largest non-COVID single-year loss in the dataset, and it dropped Wisconsin to an all-time low, 69,661 students below the 2007 peak. Whatever floor people thought they saw last year was not a floor.

What the numbers open up

The enrollment data covers 446 districts across every corner of the state. Over the coming weeks, The WIEdTribune will unpack it in a series of data-driven articles. Here is what jumps out first.

The decline streak is now a decade long. Wisconsin has lost students in every observed year since 2014-15, an unbroken run of 10 years that has erased 66,839 students. The post-COVID pace has accelerated — the state is now losing about 8,000 students per year, up from 3,550 before the pandemic. At the current rate, Wisconsin drops below 800,000 by next fall.

Milwaukee has lost one in four students. The state's largest district has shed 26,219 students since 2006, a 28.6% decline that has hollowed out entire neighborhoods. The district is running a $46 million structural deficit and cut 260 positions last year. The nation's oldest voucher program now serves more than 60,000 students across four choice programs.

Two in five districts are at their all-time low. Of 446 districts, 174 recorded their lowest enrollment ever in 2025-26, including nine of the 10 largest. Only 37 districts hit all-time highs, and many of those are Madison-area suburbs or virtual school operators.

By the numbers: 805,881 students statewide in 2025-26 — down 8,121 from the prior year, a 1.0% decline, an all-time low, and the second-largest non-COVID single-year loss on record.

The threads we are following

Wisconsin is becoming less white, fast. White enrollment has dropped from 77.9% to 65.8% of the student body, a loss of 150,475 students in 19 years. Hispanic enrollment has doubled to 14.5%. Multiracial students have tripled. The demographic transformation is happening even as total enrollment shrinks.

The kindergarten pipeline has inverted. Wisconsin now enrolls 24% more 12th graders than kindergartners, a K-to-G12 ratio of 76 that signals continued decline as large graduating classes are replaced by smaller incoming cohorts. Pre-K enrollment has collapsed 62%.

One region is growing. CESA 2, the Madison-area cooperative educational service agency region, is the only one of Wisconsin's 12 CESA regions still growing. Every other region is declining. The gap between the state's economic hub and the rest of Wisconsin is widening.

What comes next

This is the first in a series of articles examining what the 2025-26 enrollment data reveals about Wisconsin public schools. New articles publish weekly on Fridays.

The enrollment figures come from the WISEdash Public Portal. The data covers certified headcount enrollment for public school districts statewide.

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