Enrollment has climbed in some districts and fallen sharply in others since 1991, and the makeup of student bodies has shifted across the state. These six views cover district-by-district enrollment change, how far each district has fallen from its own peak, how thinly students are spread across the map, the split between city, suburb, town and rural schools, and student diversity today. New here? The glossary explains how to read the colors.
What this page shows
Missouri runs 516 public school districts for about 826,000 students — and the median district has 13.9% fewer students than it did in 1991.
Income and property wealth are different maps. A district’s median household income correlates with its property wealth per student at only +0.25 — a community can be income-poor and property-rich, or the reverse.
60 districts have fewer than three-quarters of households on broadband. Any homework that assumes a child can get online assumes this number.
Data current as ofDESE enrollment & demographics 2025–26 school yearCensus ACS 5-year 2019–2023NCES district boundaries 2024
CHANGE SINCE 1991
Enrollment change, 1991–2025
Orange districts have lost enrollment since 1991; blue districts have grown. The pattern traces Missouri’s long shift from rural to suburban.
Percent change in resident enrollment, 1991–2025, by district. Hover any district for its figures.
PICK YOUR BASELINE
Enrollment change from any starting year
The same story, but interactive: choose a baseline year with the slider on the map and the shading recalculates enrollment change from that year to 2025 — useful for isolating the COVID-era shift, for example.
Use the Baseline Year control on the map to change the comparison year.
EACH DISTRICT AGAINST ITSELF
How far below its own peak your district now is
The maps above compare every district to the same starting year. But 1991 was not every district’s high-water mark. This map asks a fairer question: whatever year your district was at its largest, how far below that is it now? It is the honest measure of decline, because it judges each district against its own history rather than a date chosen for convenience.
2025 enrollment as a percent difference from that district’s own highest enrollment year between 1991 and 2025. Dark red = far below its own peak; pale blue = at or near its historic high.
The typical Missouri district is 25% smaller than it has ever been. Only 28 of 516 districts are at their peak today. More than half — 261 districts — have lost at least a quarter of their students from their own high point, and 99 districts have lost more than 40%. Missouri City 56 is down 87% from its 1991 peak.
And the peak is mostly in the past: 282 districts peaked in the 1990s, another 134 in the 2000s. For most of Missouri, the largest that school will ever be is already a memory. The decline is deepest in rural districts (median −29%) and mildest in cities (−9%) — the reverse of what the raw 1991 map suggests, because many city districts had already shrunk before 1991.
THE GEOGRAPHY OF SMALLNESS
How thinly students are spread
Before you judge any district’s spending, its bus routes, or its four-day week, look at this map. It shows how many students each district has per square mile of territory — and it explains, quietly, most of the cost differences elsewhere on this site.
Enrolled students per square mile of district territory, 2025. Red = sparser than the typical Missouri district; blue = denser. The color scale is capped at 25 students per square mile so that rural variation stays visible — the densest districts run far past it.
The typical Missouri school district has about 4 students per square mile. Forty-seven districts have fewer than one student per square mile. Craig R-III has 51 students spread across 121 square miles. Meanwhile Clayton packs 738 students into every square mile, and the median suburban district has 196.
That is a 75-fold gap between the median rural district (2.6 students per square mile) and the median suburb. It is the reason a rural district’s per-pupil spending can look high while its classrooms have less: the same building, the same superintendent, the same bus running the same forty miles, divided among far fewer children. Sparseness is not inefficiency. It is geography.
CITY, SUBURB, TOWN & RURAL
Enrollment trends by locale, 1991–2025
The district maps show where enrollment moved; this chart shows the shape of the whole state. Suburban enrollment has climbed steadily, city enrollment has fallen hardest, rural has drifted down, and towns have held roughly flat — the single clearest picture of Missouri’s demographic shift.
Total enrollment by NCES locale category, 1991–2025. Hover any line for year-by-year figures.
STUDENT DIVERSITY
Who is in the classroom today
The share of students who are nonwhite, by district, in 2025. Diversity concentrates sharply in the Kansas City and St. Louis metros and in a handful of southwest Missouri districts, while much of the rural interior remains predominantly white.
Nonwhite student percentage by district, 2025. Darker shading means a higher share.
THE COMMUNITY BEHIND THE SCHOOL
Four ways to look at the places these districts serve
A school district is not just an institution — it is a community. This map carries four measures of that community, drawn from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Use the selector on the map to switch between them: median household income, broadband access, the share of adults holding a college degree, and the share of families with children headed by a single parent.
Four community indicators by school district. U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates, 2019–2023, tabulated to school-district boundaries. Darker = higher. A note on the color scale: the shading runs from the 5th to the 95th percentile rather than from the true minimum to the true maximum, so that a handful of extreme districts do not flatten the other 500. Districts beyond those bounds are shown at the darkest or lightest shade; hover any district to see its actual value.
These are genuinely different places. Compare the district at the 95th percentile with the one at the 5th, and you find 2.2 times the household income ($92,646 vs $42,155), 4.2 times the college-degree rate (39.8% vs 9.4%), and 6.2 times the single-parent share (54.1% vs 8.8%). The median Missouri district has a household income of $59,769 — well below the state figure of $68,920, because Missouri’s income is concentrated in a small number of populous suburban districts.
And here is the finding that matters most for this site. A community’s income tells you remarkably little about the tax base its schools actually run on. The correlation between median household income and assessed property value per student is just +0.25.
They come apart in both directions, and the exceptions are not rare. Lutie R-VI holds $338,836 of assessed value behind every student — among the richest tax bases in Missouri — while its households earn a median of $37,692. It is a lakeside district: the property is valuable, the people who live there year-round are not wealthy. Run it the other way and Clever R-V earns $87,519 per household but holds only $98,166 of assessed value per student — a commuter town whose residents earn their money somewhere else and own little the district may tax.
Missouri funds its schools from property, not from income. This map and the dime test are therefore two different maps, and a community can be prosperous on one and poor on the other. Anyone reasoning about school funding from what a town looks like should check both.
The broadband map is the one to look at if you care about homework. The median rural district reports 81.8% of households with a broadband subscription, against 92.3% in the median suburb. Sixty districts sit below 75% — meaning one household in four has no broadband at all. In Middle Grove C-1 the figure is 44%. Any policy that assumes a child can finish an assignment online is, in those districts, assuming something that is not true for a quarter of the families.
QUESTIONS OR DATA SUGGESTIONS?
Contact Dr. Jon Turner
Associate Professor of Educational Leadership · Missouri State University, Springfield MO