Chicago Public Schools loses 11,500 students in largest decline since pandemic
Enrollment has dropped by 20% over the past 10 years.
Chicago Public Schools has lost more than 11,500 students since the start of last school year, marking the district’s largest enrollment decline since the COVID-19 pandemic.
CPS enrollment fell to 304,687 students for the 2026-27 school year, according to a preliminary 20th-day enrollment report from the district.
The latest drop continues an enrollment decline that has left CPS with 76,000 fewer students than a decade ago.
This year’s enrollment decline also exacerbates Chicago’s empty-schools problem. More than half of CPS’ buildings were already underutilized in the 2025-2026 school year.
Largest enrollment drop since pandemic
CPS lost more students this year than in any year since fall 2020, when enrollment dropped by nearly 14,500 students after pandemic-era school closures.
The district continued losing students the next two years before modest enrollment increases in 2023 and 2024. Those gains were short-lived: CPS lost more than 9,000 students in 2025.
With this year’s decline, the district has now lost more than 20,000 students in just two school years, more than erasing the roughly 3,300 students gained during 2023 and 2024.
The district pointed to declining birth rates and migration trends as factors driving the latest enrollment decline.
CPS has lost 1-in-5 students in a decade
The latest decline is part of a much larger trend.
CPS has lost more than 76,000 students in a decade. That’s about 20%, or 1-in-5 students.
Going back further, the district experienced 11 straight years of enrollment declines from 2011 through 2022 before the brief increases in 2023 and 2024.
Enrollment decline exacerbates CPS’s empty-school problem
The latest enrollment decline further strains a district already dealing with widespread underutilization.
Before this year’s enrollment losses, 54% of CPS buildings were already underutilized, or more than 250 schools.
The district measures space utilization annually, labeling schools underutilized, efficient or overcrowded. An elementary school’s ideal capacity is 77% of its maximum capacity and a high school’s is 80%.
Analyzing district data, the average “space utilization rate” in 2025-2026 was 68% across 476 single-location schools. That means the average CPS school is one-third empty.
A series of moratoriums on school closures in Chicago have been in place for years. The current ban was extended by the partially elected school board and is scheduled to end after the 2026-2027 school year.
The latest enrollment declines call into question whether Chicago’s soon-to-be-elected school board should continue the closure moratorium.
The Chicago Teachers Union and some current board members rallied outside CPS headquarters Thursday, the same day as the board meeting in which the enrollment numbers were announced, to demand an extension on the closure moratorium.
The CPS board should convene a commission for CPS facilities planning
The Chicago Policy Center has put together a “CPS Excellence Agenda” for school board candidates. It’s built on three pillars: academic excellence, financial excellence and board excellence.
One of its recommendations: convening a Blue Ribbon Commission for CPS facilities planning that should:
- Assess the facility footprint.
- Establish an ongoing framework to optimize facilities for student success, including core principles of utilization, neighborhood coverage and model staffing.
- Set consistent minimum enrollment and performance standards and a consistent “high bar” standard that triggers school-model replication.
- Compare CPS’ capital financing ability to other large districts.
With enrollment continuing to fall, the new school board will face a choice: extend the school closure moratorium or allow it to expire and convene a comprehensive facilities-planning commission to determine how CPS should adapt to fewer students.