9,000 children don’t show up in Colorado school data. Where did they go?

Kindergarten enrollment is down. Dropout rates are up. Public school enrollment still hasn’t rebounded to where it was in 2019, before COVID-19 turned education upside down.

Where have the kids gone?

A new analysis by The Associated Press and Stanford University’s Big Local News project found an estimated 230,000 students in 21 states absent from publicly available data on public and private school enrollment and home schooling.

That tally includes as many as 9,000 uncounted in Colorado, or about 1% of the state’s school-age children.

The uncounted likely include students learning in private school and at their kitchen tables who simply haven’t been reported, along with children who aren’t in school at all.

The findings further illustrate the pandemic’s profound impact on education, with some families rethinking their options and other students struggling to stay connected. They also demonstrate the difficulty of getting a full picture of where students have landed as a result of the upheaval.

States like Colorado where kindergarten is voluntary have many more unaccounted-for children than states where kindergarten is required, the analysis found. Birth rates have declined, meaning there are fewer 5-year-olds than even a few years ago, and thousands of families have moved out of state. But those changes don’t fully account for the decline in kindergarten enrollment.