The 2026-27 school year is upon us, and while we may not know exactly how many students will enroll in public schools statewide, we do know there will be fewer.
At least, that’s what Clark County School officials are expecting. During a school board meeting in April, district officials shared upcoming enrollment projections of around 2,300 fewer students this school year than last.
It’s a new trend, CCSD Superintendent Jhone Ebert told district trustees during that meeting: “For decades our narrative was defined by rapid population growth, and we were constantly in a race to build schools. As enrollment shifts here and across the country, we have a unique opportunity; we can move from keeping up to intentionally designing for excellence.”
Just last school year, statewide public K-12 enrollment declined by around 2 percent, with all but three public school districts reporting a drop, according to Nevada Department of Education data.
The most notable exception was the state’s public charter school system, which grew by roughly 11 percent in 2025-26 compared with the previous school year. That’s largely because six schools that Clark County School District previously oversaw transferred to the charter school authority’s oversight last summer.
Charter schools have reported consistent, steady growth since state lawmakers created the Nevada State Public Charter School Authority in 2011. Now, more than 70,000 students are enrolled in a public charter school in Nevada, making it the second-largest school district in the state. That’s compared to about 30,000 a decade ago.
Parents have also increasingly turned to homeschooling as an educational alternative to traditional public schools. Roughly 6 percent of families with school-aged children in Nevada reportedly homeschooled in 2023-2024, according to the US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey. Previous analysis from The Nevada Independent shows that the number of families homeschooling their children is roughly double pre-pandemic numbers. (For more on homeschooling, see p. 54.)
“Education should never be one-size-fits-all,” said Valeria Gurr in a recent op-ed for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. She was voicing support of a tax credit for donations made to qualified scholarship-granting organizations, which in turn helps students attend private school.
As a senior policy and advocacy fellow at the American Federation for Children, Gurr has long argued that incentivizing programs to give families more say over their children’s education benefits the community as a whole. “Parents know their children best, yet too often families are limited by income, geography, or a school environment that simply is not the right fit,” she wrote.
Another issue hampering enrollment rates is people not having as many kids as they used to. According to Pew Research, Nevada’s fertility rate fell more than 17 percent from 2011 to 2023. That’s six points higher than the national average, which also declined by roughly 11 percent. Overall, between 2011 and 2023, Nevada experienced the nation’s fifth-largest drop in birth rates.
The report highlighted several potential causes, including steep declines in teenage pregnancies. It also noted that women were waiting longer to have children due to financial concerns about student debt, rising housing costs, and pessimism about the economic outlook for future generations.
Why do enrollment declines matter? To put it simply, fewer students mean less money.
Nevada funds education using a formula known as the pupil-centered plan. The state appropriates a base amount of funding to a district based on each student’s needs. If a student needs free and reduced lunch or if they’re an English language learner, then more money is allocated based on that student. So, when a student changes schools, the money follows the student to the new school. But if that student leaves the district altogether, then the district loses that money outright.
In May, the Clark County School Board approved a tentative $3.8 billion state revenue budget for the 2026-27 school year. That’s about $60 million less than the previous year. The reduction is largely due to fluctuations in enrollment numbers.
CCSD Chief Financial Officer Justin Dayhoff said the budget already includes many hard decisions that principals have made. “We did this based on those projections for next year in part so we can continue as a district to be intentional with our spending,” he said.
It all snowballed into what education experts have dubbed the “enrollment cliff,” and it appears Nevada’s public schools have careened over the edge. So, what are school districts doing about it?
In Northern Nevada, Washoe County officials have proposed eliminating gifted and some technical programs, cutting staff, and closing older schools. During one conversation about what to do with the growing number of empty buildings, the district’s chief operations officer, Adam Searcy, framed it as a “brand-new world.”
“We are trying to judiciously take this one step at a time,” he said. “While we need a partnership with the community in everything that we do, this is different than normal in that we deeply need to find a future use for these properties that is of benefit to the community.”
In February, Clark County announced that more than 1,200 school employees were at risk of losing their jobs due to a lack of funding. District officials have since said they believe that natural staff attrition will help keep most of those people with the district. Of course, hoping staff retire and move on at the same rate that students leave does not make a cogent plan for the future.
CCSD Superintendent Ebert previously told Desert Companion that the district was also reviewing its facilities plan to better utilize school spaces. That could include revitalizing older schools rather than building new ones, and merging schools when consolidation allows, she said, adding that working with partners could fill unneeded space.
“We have over 1,500 portable (classrooms) in the Clark County School District. We’re not going to need those portables anymore,” Ebert said. “Do we sell them off? Do we have other entities come in — nonprofits that partner with us like the United Way or Communities in Schools — do we make those spaces now available for our partners in our schools?”
Still, it may not be enough to ward off future closures and layoffs.
As it happens, Nevada is not walking off the enrollment cliff alone. Massachusetts, Virginia, Michigan, Texas, and California all face similar issues. Perhaps, somewhere across the country, educational leaders can find a parachute on the way down.
