Dove Schools of OKC - EdTribune OK - Oklahoma Education Data

Two of Three Oklahoma Districts Lost Students This Year

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In 2019, 333 Oklahoma districts lost students. The state still grew by 3,770, because a handful of fast-expanding charter and virtual schools more than offset the losses. In 2025-26, 350 districts lost students, a nearly identical count. The state dropped by 10,640.

The difference: the districts still growing can no longer compensate.

The broadest decline outside the pandemic

Oklahoma's 2025-26 enrollment of 686,718 represents a 1.5% decline from the prior year, a single-year loss that exceeds even the COVID drop of 9,537 in 2020-21. But the pandemic was a shock concentrated in one year: 427 of 539 districts declined in 2021, a 4.6-to-1 ratio of losers to gainers. The system rebounded quickly, with 368 districts growing the following year.

The 2025-26 350-to-181 ratio, roughly 2-to-1, is less extreme. It is also harder to dismiss. The decline is neither a one-time shock nor a recovery dip. It is the third consecutive year of statewide losses, following drops of 2,156 in 2024 and 1,744 in 2025, and it arrived five times larger than either predecessor.

Districts holding 73% of Oklahoma's total enrollment shrank in 2025-26. Declining districts collectively lost 17,337 students. Growing districts added 6,719. The net: a deficit that accounts for nearly all of the statewide drop.

Losses run deep, not just wide

The top 10 losing districts account for 40.1% of total losses. Oklahoma City^↗ alone shed 1,646 students, a 5.0% decline. Tulsa^↗ lost 1,167 (3.5%). Moore^↗, Edmond^↗, and Putnam City^↗ lost 852, 753, and 714 respectively. Six of the eight largest traditional districts in the state are on the list.

But here is the finding that distinguishes 2026 from prior years: the other half of the losses, 49.6%, came from 330 districts, most of them small. That distribution matters. When losses concentrate in a few large urban systems, policymakers can point to city-specific factors. When 185 districts with fewer than 500 students each collectively lose 3,167, the explanation has to be structural.

Across all size categories, a majority of districts shrank. Among the 13 districts enrolling 10,000 or more students, 10 declined (76.9%). Among the 309 districts under 500 students, 185 declined (59.9%). The median percentage decline was steepest at the extremes: -2.9% for the largest districts, -2.4% for the smallest.

Who is still growing

The gainers list tells its own story. Epic Charter School^↗ added 665 students. Dove Schools of OKC^↗ gained 642. Insight School of Oklahoma^↗, a virtual charter, grew by 374. Oklahoma Virtual Charter Academy^↗ added 353.

Of the top 10 gainers, eight are charter or virtual entities.

Among traditional districts, Norman^↗ stands out. It added 582 students, a 3.6% gain, the only traditional district in the top five gainers. Bixby^↗ gained 158, Piedmont^↗ 90, and Deer Creek^↗ a modest 9. Suburban growth pockets remain, but they are narrowing.

The sector split is stark. Charter and virtual entities gained a net 2,607 students; traditional districts lost 13,225. That divergence is not new. Traditional enrollment fell from 667,904 in 2020 to 636,960 in 2026, a net loss of 30,944 students (4.6%), with partial recoveries in 2022 and 2023 before resuming decline. Charter and virtual enrollment over the same period rose from 35,746 to 49,758, a gain of 14,012 (39.2%).

Birth rates, school choice, and the limits of explanation

Oklahoma's fertility rate fell 12.2% between 2011 and 2023, according to the March of Dimes, the second-largest drop in a 17-state regional comparison. Fewer births a decade ago means fewer kindergartners now: Oklahoma's kindergarten class has fallen from 52,732 in 2020 to 45,680 in 2026, a 13.4% decline. That pipeline pressure will propagate upward through the grade structure for years.

The state's Parental Choice Tax Credit, enacted in 2023 and launched in 2024, provides refundable credits of $5,000 to $7,500 per child for private school tuition and $1,000 for homeschool expenses. In its first full year, the program served 39,485 students, though only 3,762 of those, fewer than 10%, had been enrolled in public school the prior semester, according to Oklahoma Tax Commission data reported by Oklahoma Watch. The program's funding cap rises from $150 million in 2024 to $250 million in 2026, so its pull on public enrollment may strengthen.

Neither explanation is complete on its own. Birth rate decline is the most plausible driver of the broad-based losses affecting small rural districts. School choice policy more directly affects metro-area systems where private school options are concentrated. The two forces overlap in the aggregate number but likely operate through different channels at different scales.

One significant unknown: Oklahoma does not require families to register or notify the state when they choose homeschooling, and no comprehensive count of private school students exists. The gap between the 10,640-student statewide decline and the 3,762 students who demonstrably switched to the tax credit program leaves roughly 6,900 students unaccounted for by school choice alone.

121 districts have declined three straight years

Beyond the single-year count, 121 districts have now lost enrollment in each of the past three years, from 2024 through 2026. That is nearly one in four Oklahoma districts locked in a multi-year contraction with no reversal in sight.

"I see what's coming... if it doesn't go through, we can hang in here, and we can be like a lot of other schools that have slowly dwindled." — David Morris, Paoli superintendent, on a proposed annexation with Whitebead Public Schools, KGOU, May 2025

More than 100 Oklahoma schools have been absorbed by neighboring districts since the state began tracking annexations in 1976. The current enrollment trajectory suggests more will follow. At 309 districts with fewer than 500 students, Oklahoma's district structure is a product of an era when the state's school-age population was larger. At statehood, the state had nearly 6,000 districts. It had 539 in 2025-26, and 185 of those lost students that year while already below 500.

What to watch next

The kindergarten class of 2026 is 7,052 students smaller than the class of 2020. Those students do not reappear. Each year's kindergarten cohort becomes the next year's first graders, and no grade above kindergarten can grow faster than the cohort that feeds into it. The pipeline is contracting.

For the 185 districts under 500 students that shrank in 2025-26, that contraction is not abstract budget math. It is the difference between fielding a basketball team and not, between keeping a music teacher and sharing one with a district 30 miles away. Paoli's superintendent is already talking about annexation. He will not be the last.

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Oklahoma Lost More Students This Year Than During COVID

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 12:00:00 GMT

The last time Oklahoma lost this many students in a single year, schools were closed, parents were afraid to send children to classrooms, and a pandemic had upended American life. This time there is no pandemic.

Oklahoma's public schools enrolled 686,718 students in the 2025-26 October count, a drop of 10,640 from the prior year, 1.5% of the student body. That loss exceeds the 9,537-student COVID drop of 2020-21 by more than 1,100 students, making it the largest single-year decline in the state's 11-year enrollment dataset. The state now sits 7,395 students below the COVID-era floor it hit in 2021, at the lowest enrollment recorded since at least 2015-16.

A false recovery

The trajectory since 2020 tells the story in two acts. After the COVID plunge, Oklahoma clawed back 7,145 students over two years, recovering 74.9% of the loss by 2022-23. That partial recovery peaked at 701,258 students. Then enrollment reversed again: small losses of 2,156 and 1,744 in the next two years, followed by the 10,640-student cliff in 2025-26. The three-year post-recovery slide has now erased 14,540 students, more than 1.5 times the original COVID loss.

The pattern is not a gradual decline accelerating slowly. The state added students through 2019-20, lost them to COVID, got most back, and then fell off a ledge. Of 539 districts reporting in both years, 350 shrank in 2025-26. Only 181 grew. The losses are not concentrated in a handful of places: 183 districts, 35.3% of those with five or more years of data, are at their all-time enrollment low.

Where the students are leaving

Oklahoma City^↗ lost 1,646 students in a single year, dropping from 32,750 to 31,104. That is a 5.0% decline in one year for the state's second-largest district, part of a longer collapse that has seen OKC shed 14,473 students since 2015-16, a 31.8% loss. Tulsa^↗ lost 1,167, falling to 32,450. Tulsa overtook OKC as the state's largest district in 2021-22 and has held that position for five straight years as OKC's decline has been steeper.

The suburban metro districts felt it too. Moore^↗ lost 852 students (3.6%), Edmond^↗ lost 753 (2.9%), and Putnam City^↗ lost 714 (3.8%). The eight largest losing districts together shed 6,439 students, 61% of the statewide loss. Lawton^↗, the state's largest district outside the two metros, lost 376.

The exceptions tell their own story. Norman^↗ gained 582 students. Epic Charter School^↗, which operates as a statewide virtual charter, added 665 students to reach 29,201. Four of the five largest gainers were charter or virtual schools. Dove Schools of OKC^↗ added 642 students, Insight School of Oklahoma^↗ added 374, and Oklahoma Virtual Charter Academy^↗ added 353.

Three forces, no single villain

The most likely primary driver is demographics. Oklahoma's fertility rate fell nearly 12% between 2013 and 2023, and the national rate hit an all-time low of 1.6 births per woman in 2024, well below the 2.1 replacement level. Kindergarten enrollment in Oklahoma has fallen from 53,453 in 2015-16 to 45,680 in 2025-26, a 14.5% decline. Twelfth-grade enrollment over the same period rose 17.0%, from 42,061 to 49,213. In 2024-25, kindergarten dropped below 12th grade for the first time. The ratio now stands at 92.8 kindergartners for every 100 seniors, down from 127.1 a decade ago. Fewer children are entering the system than leaving it.

The state's Parental Choice Tax Credit, signed in 2023 and launched in 2024, provides $5,000 to $7,500 per child for private school tuition. Approximately 39,485 students received credits in 2025-26, but the direct enrollment impact is more modest than the headline number suggests: 3,762 of those students attended public school the prior semester, meaning the tax credit accounts for roughly a third of the 10,640-student loss at most. The rest were already in private schools or newly entering students who chose private from the start. The program's cap rose from $150 million to $250 million for the 2026 tax year.

A competing explanation is the continued growth of virtual and charter schools within the public system. Enrollment in identifiable virtual and charter entities reached approximately 57,000 students in 2025-26, or 8.3% of the state total. Epic Charter School alone enrolled 29,201 students, despite an ongoing criminal investigation in which co-founders Ben Harris and David Chaney face racketeering and embezzlement charges. Virtual charter growth does not reduce total public enrollment, but it does redistribute per-pupil funding away from brick-and-mortar districts, compounding the fiscal impact of the headcount decline.

What reporting says

"There were 10,000 fewer students enrolled in Oklahoma public schools this year compared to last year, a dip of 1.5%. Falling birth rates are the main culprit." -- Oklahoma Watch, Jan. 28, 2026

Oklahoma Watch's Jennifer Palmer reported that enrollment decreased in every grade except 4th, 7th, and 11th, with the steepest drops among the youngest students in pre-K through 3rd grade. That pattern aligns with the birth-rate explanation: the children not being born five and six years ago are now the kindergartners not enrolling.

"Nearly 70 percent of children using the Oklahoma Parental Choice Tax Credit program to leave public schools and enroll in private schools for the first time in the 2025-2026 school year are from low- and middle-income families." -- Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, 2025

State Rep. John Waldron noted that "few private schools have opened up or expanded to take in kids from economically challenged regions," a constraint on how much the tax credit can grow.

The fiscal math

Only 28.5% of districts with comparable data have recovered to their pre-COVID enrollment levels. The other 71.5%, 369 districts, are funding operations on a smaller student base than they had six years ago. In a state that ranks 48th nationally in student outcomes and near the bottom in per-pupil spending, the loss of 10,640 funded seats translates directly into reduced state aid. Oklahoma's funding formula allocates dollars based on weighted average daily membership. Fewer students means less money, regardless of whether fixed costs like building maintenance, transportation routes, and administrative staff have changed.

The pipeline chart points to where this is headed. With 45,680 kindergartners and 49,213 seniors, each graduating class is being replaced by a smaller incoming one. Unless migration or policy reverses the pattern, the state will continue shedding students through at least the end of the decade as Oklahoma's smaller 2025-26 elementary cohorts advance through the system.

The children who will enter kindergarten in fall 2027 were born in 2022, one of Oklahoma's lowest birth years on record. The cliff was not a one-time adjustment. It was the first year the pipeline math caught up with the birth rate.

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Epic Charter: The School That Swallowed Oklahoma

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 12:00:00 GMT

In 2016, Epic Charter Schools enrolled 6,037 students, less than 1% of Oklahoma's public school population. Five years later it enrolled 59,445, more than any other public school entity in the state. No single school entity in Oklahoma history had grown that fast, and none had ever overtaken both of the state's two largest districts in a single year.

Then it fell apart. Co-founders charged with racketeering. A forensic investigation. 500 employees terminated. Enrollment cut in half. In 2025-26, Epic Charter School^↗ enrolls 29,201 students, 4.3% of the state total. It remains Oklahoma's third-largest public school entity, larger than Edmond or Moore, but its trajectory looks nothing like it did four years ago.

From startup to state's largest in five years

Epic began as a single virtual charter school in 2011, offering a one-on-one online learning model. By 2016, it had expanded to 6,037 students. A second entity, Epic Blended Learning Charter, launched in 2017-18, and the two operations together reached 13,158 students by 2018, a 118% increase in two years.

The pre-pandemic growth was already extraordinary. Epic added 8,147 students in 2018-19 alone, reaching 21,305. COVID-19 turned that growth exponential. As families pulled children from in-person classrooms across Oklahoma, Epic added 6,763 students in 2019-20 and then 31,377 in 2020-21, more than doubling its enrollment in a single year.

At its 2020-21 peak, Epic's combined enrollment of 59,445 made it the largest public school entity in Oklahoma. Tulsa^↗ fell to 35,765 that year. Oklahoma City^↗ fell to 37,344. Epic was larger than both by a wide margin, a virtual school system that had eclipsed two urban districts with decades of history and hundreds of physical buildings.

The 9.8-fold increase from 2016 to 2021 occurred across all grade levels. At the peak, 28,254 of Epic's students were in elementary grades (PK through fifth), 12,803 in middle school, and 18,388 in high school. Nearly half of its peak enrollment was elementary-age children, a population that would prove the least sticky when in-person schooling resumed.

The unraveling

The reversal was almost as fast as the rise. Epic lost 21,111 students between 2020-21 and 2021-22, a 35.5% decline in a single year. It lost another 9,856 the following year. By 2022-23, enrollment had fallen to 28,478, a 52.1% decline from the peak.

The initial decline was a return-to-school effect. Families who had enrolled in Epic as a pandemic alternative went back to their neighborhood schools when buildings reopened. Elementary enrollment took the hardest hit: Epic's PK-5 enrollment fell from 28,254 to 7,370 between 2021 and 2026, a 73.9% drop. High school enrollment, by contrast, fell only 18.2%, from 18,388 to 15,041. The students most likely to stay were those who had chosen virtual learning as a deliberate preference, not a pandemic refuge.

But the enrollment decline was compounded by a governance crisis that had been building for years. Epic's co-founders, Ben Harris and David Chaney, were charged in 2022 with 15 felonies each, including racketeering, embezzlement, and obtaining money by false pretenses. The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation had alleged that the co-founders used a student "Learning Fund" to commingle funds, make political donations, and pay personal expenses. Authorities estimated the scheme cost Oklahoma taxpayers $22 million.

Budget collapse and the 500 layoffs

Even after the co-founders were removed from operations and the school's accreditation was downgraded to probation, Epic's financial troubles deepened. In April 2025, the school's budget swung from a $3.1 million surplus to an $8.7 million projected deficit within two weeks. The finance chief attributed the error to a benefits cost that was "mistakenly counted twice." Superintendent Bart Banfield resigned in June 2025.

The financial crisis was rooted in enrollment projections that bore little resemblance to reality. Administrators had projected 33,000 students for 2024-25. Actual enrollment came in at 28,536, a gap of roughly 4,500 students. The school had hired and budgeted as if those students were coming.

"Operating without basic budgeting and oversight controls for leaders to make informed, responsible decisions" created unsustainable costs. — Statewide Charter School Board, Forensic Investigation Report, January 2026

The forensic investigation by Carr, Riggs & Ingram, released January 2026, found no embezzlement by the post-scandal leadership. It found something arguably worse for institutional credibility: a finance superintendent who maintained two budget versions (one public, one private), a reported carryover of $60.4 million that was actually $43.7 million, and a governing board that asked just six questions across all of the finance chief's budget presentations that year.

The result was 501 employees terminated between October 2024 and July 2025, including 357 teachers and administrators in a single June layoff. Minimum teacher salary was cut from $60,000 to $50,000 for those with student rosters under 28.

The school that stayed

After three years of losses, Epic stabilized. Enrollment ticked up slightly from 27,054 in 2023-24 to 28,536 in 2024-25 and 29,201 in 2025-26, a net gain of 723 students over three years. The hemorrhaging stopped, but the recovery has been minimal: Epic's 2025-26 enrollment is less than half its 2020-21 peak.

Epic remains the state's third-largest public school entity, behind Tulsa (32,450) and Oklahoma City (31,104). The gap between Epic and Oklahoma City has narrowed to 1,903 students. Before Epic's pandemic surge, Oklahoma City held 45,577 students in 2015-16 and had been the state's largest district since well before the data begins. Tulsa overtook OKC in 2021-22, a crossover driven partly by OKC's own enrollment losses and partly by the destabilizing effect of Epic's peak: when 59,445 students were enrolled in a virtual school drawing from every ZIP code in the state, every brick-and-mortar district felt the pull.

A different school at the bottom

The Epic that exists in 2025-26 is structurally different from the one that peaked in 2021. At the peak, 47.5% of Epic's students were in elementary grades. In 2025-26, 25.2% were. High school students now make up 51.5% of Epic's enrollment, up from 30.9% at the peak.

This shift has consequences. Epic now enrolls 15,041 high school students, 7.3% of all ninth through twelfth graders in Oklahoma. In a state that ranks 49th in per-pupil spending according to the National Education Association, that concentration of high schoolers in a single virtual entity shapes graduation pipelines, course access, and extracurricular availability for thousands of families.

The pandemic families who enrolled kindergartners at Epic in 2020-21 mostly left. The families that remain are more likely to have chosen virtual schooling deliberately. Whether that represents a stable floor or a temporary plateau depends in part on what happens in court.

What the broader landscape absorbed

Epic's enrollment swings were large enough to distort statewide numbers. Oklahoma's total public enrollment in 2020-21 was 694,113, down 9,537 from the prior year's peak of 703,650. Exclude Epic, and non-Epic enrollment that year was 634,668, a loss of 40,914 from the prior year's non-Epic total. Epic absorbed students that the statewide number suggested had simply vanished.

The broader charter and virtual sector grew even as Epic contracted. Non-Epic charter and virtual entities enrolled 6,593 students in 2016. By 2026, that figure is 27,935 across 27 entities, a 323.6% increase. OKC Charter Santa Fe South^↗ now enrolls 4,845. Oklahoma Virtual Charter Academy^↗ has 3,966. Dove Schools of OKC^↗ has 2,694. The sector that Epic helped pioneer has diversified well beyond a single operator.

The combined charter and virtual sector now enrolls 57,136 students, 8.3% of Oklahoma's 686,718 total. Even without Epic, the sector accounts for 4.1% of statewide enrollment. Virtual schooling survived Epic's scandal. It just scattered across more operators.

A criminal case still unresolved

The separate criminal prosecution of co-founders Harris and Chaney, which predates the budget collapse, entered its next phase in February 2026 after nearly two years of procedural delays. Both face 15 felony counts. A former Epic CFO testified in late February that the co-founders sought "retribution" against the state auditor who flagged the financial irregularities. Attorney General Gentner Drummond's office has said it remains "fully focused on presenting the facts and evidence."

The trial's outcome will not change Epic's enrollment trajectory. The 30,000 students who vanished from Epic between 2021 and 2023 are not coming back; they are enrolled elsewhere or have aged out. But the case will determine whether the institution that reshaped Oklahoma's competitive landscape did so through fraud or simply through the kind of aggressive growth that a lightly regulated charter environment allows.

For the 29,201 students who remain, that distinction matters less than whether the school's new leadership, now operating under tighter oversight from the Statewide Charter School Board, can run a budget without two versions.

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