Extending understanding of the relationship between school district COVID-19 reopening plan signals and enrollment decline

Abstract

Preceding the 2020-21 school year, school districts engaged their communities by sharing pandemic school reopening plans, outlining the learning modalities and support services to be made accessible to students. Existing research has highlighted a connection between a district’s primary reopening method and changes in student enrollment—a crucial aspect for gauging responsiveness to different learning environments. Conversely, limited research has established the relationship between new health and safety procedures, provisions for vulnerable students, learning support services, or the level of community engagement undertaken by a district in creating reopening plans and student enrollment change, independent of the method of reopening (e.g., in-person or distanced). We do so using two methodological approaches. First, we use differences-in-differences approaches to estimate the impact of reopening method on enrollment changes. Second, we leverage granular data of reopening plans for a representative sample of Missouri school districts in a triple-differences approach. We find that signaling the intent to begin the school year with distanced instruction generated a 3% decline in enrollment beyond pandemic-era declines, concentrated among the youngest students. Extending existing reopening findings, we also estimate that enrollment declined an additional 5% in middle schools where districts did not require masking.