AXIOS Chicago | Monica Eng | December 22, 2021
National Public Radio recently reported that public school enrollment across the nation continues to decline.
Why it matters: This includes the loss of 10,000 students at Chicago Public Schools this year after losing 14,000 the previous school year.
- Researchers told NPR that some parents are delaying pre-K and kindergarten enrollment, which saw a 13% drop last year.
- But more are turning to charter schools, private schools and especially homeschooling.
Zoom in: Local homeschooling data is hard to pin down since Illinois is one of only 11 states to not require homeschooling families to register.
- But national homeschool curriculum developers Time4learning tell us they added “548 new families in the Chicago area at the beginning of the 2021-2022 school year.”
- “In the state of Illinois, Time4Learning saw 3,431 new student profiles created from August to October. For context, only 1,113 new profiles were created in 2019.”
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