Last year, Alaska's public school enrollment dropped to 126,284 students. It looked like the state might be finding a floor — the previous two years had shown modest growth that nearly erased the COVID dip. Budget planners in Juneau talked about stabilization.

There is no floor. DEED's 2025-26 enrollment count came in at 125,317, down another 967 students and a new seven-year low. The state has now lost 3,272 students since its 2020 peak of 128,589, and the trajectory is accelerating: a 157-student loss in 2023-24 became 1,647 in 2024-25 and 967 in 2025-26.

Whatever people thought they saw in 2022-23 was not a bottom. It was a pause.

What the numbers open up

AnchorageET is losing students faster than the state. The district shed 4,530 students in seven years — more than the entire statewide decline. It is closing three elementary schools, cutting nearly 300 teaching positions, and staring at a $90 million structural deficit on a $700 million budget. The rest of Alaska, on net, grew — but only because of correspondence programs.

Alaska's correspondence system is now the state's largest school. One in eight Alaska students learns through a mail-based or virtual program. Galena CityET School District, a village of 500 people in the interior, enrolls 8,279 students through its IDEA correspondence program — making it the single largest school operation in the state. Strip out correspondence growth, and the traditional system lost roughly 8,300 students.

Half the state is at record lows. Twenty-nine of Alaska's 53 districts hit their lowest enrollment on record in 2025-26. The list runs from Anchorage (40,688) to Hydaburg (62). Thirteen districts are at all-time highs in DEED's school-level data, though Mat-Su's 19,903 includes a new 1,114-student virtual program.

By the numbers: 125,317 students statewide in 2025-26 — down 967 from the prior year, a 0.8% decline and a new seven-year low. Alaska has lost 3,272 students since 2020.

The threads we are following

Native enrollment is falling faster than any other group. Alaska Native and American Indian students make up 21% of the state's enrollment but have declined at nearly twice the statewide rate. The state lost 1,353 Native students since 2020, a 4.9% drop, while federal funding for Alaska Native education programs was cut in September 2025.

Mat-SuET's DEED total masks a more complicated picture. Alaska's second-largest district shows 19,903 students in DEED's school-level data, but 1,114 are enrolled in the Mat-Su Hybrid Learning Academy, a new virtual program that launched in 2025-26. Superintendent Randy Trani's district-level count is 18,912, a slight decline from the prior year. The Mat-Su Borough led the state in population growth, adding 1,696 residents in 2024-25, but that population growth has not yet translated into traditional classroom gains. Mat-Su faces a $22.5 million budget shortfall.

The kindergarten pipeline is collapsing. For every 100 seniors graduating, Alaska has only 84 kindergartners entering. The state's K-to-G12 ratio has inverted, signaling that enrollment losses will deepen for at least a decade as smaller cohorts move through the system.

What comes next

This is the first in a weekly series examining what Alaska's 2025-26 enrollment data reveals about the state's schools. New articles publish Mondays through late May.

Data source

Alaska Department of Education and Early Development, Data Center. Enrollment counts reflect the 20-day count for the 2025-26 school year.