In this series: Montana 2025-26 Enrollment.

Two years ago, Montana's public schools enrolled 150,573 students — the most in at least a decade and proof, to many, that the state's growth streak was alive and well. Twelve consecutive years of increases had made enrollment gains seem like a law of nature.

Then it stopped. In 2024, enrollment fell for the first time in over a decade, shedding 1,988 students. In 2025, the decline more than doubled to 4,068. And now the Office of Public Instruction has published its 2025-26 enrollment figures: 142,071 students statewide, down another 2,446. In three years, Montana has lost 8,502 students — 5.6% of its peak enrollment — and the 2026 figure is the lowest in nine years of state records.

What the numbers open up

Montana is 390 districts spread across 147,000 square miles. Most of them are small — 85% enroll fewer than 500 students, and 40 have ten or fewer. That structure means even modest enrollment losses force painful decisions in places with no margin to absorb them. Over the coming weeks, The MTEdTribune will unpack what this year's data reveals.

Montana's three-year cliff is the sharpest sustained decline on record. The 2024 loss broke a 12-year growth streak. The 2025 loss doubled it. The 2026 loss continued it. At the three-year average pace of roughly 2,800 students per year, Montana will fall below 130,000 by 2030.

Native American enrollment is declining at twice the rate of white peers. Native American students — 10.3% of Montana's enrollment — have fallen 12.3% since 2018, compared to 6.4% for white students. Reservation-adjacent districts are losing students at rates that threaten the viability of schools built to serve them.

More than 100 districts are at their all-time low. A third of Montana's 390 districts recorded their lowest enrollment in 2025-26, including five of the six largest. The losses are not concentrated in one region — they stretch from Billings to Butte to the Hi-Line.

By the numbers: 142,071 students statewide in 2025-26 — down 2,446 from the prior year and 8,502 from the 2023 peak. That is a 5.6% decline in three years. Montana is now 14,273 students below where its pre-COVID growth trajectory would have put it.

The threads we are following

Hispanic students are Montana's only growing demographic. Every other racial group is shrinking. Hispanic enrollment has grown 44.8% since 2018, but at 5,671 students it remains a small share of a state that is 76% white.

Montana now graduates more students than it enrolls in first grade. The K-to-12th grade pipeline has inverted — a structural signal that the enrollment decline is not a blip but the beginning of a long contraction driven by smaller incoming cohorts.

Bozeman is booming while Billings bleeds. The state's enrollment map has split along a growth/decline axis that tracks housing costs, migration patterns, and economic diversification.

What comes next

Each of these threads will get its own article with charts, district-level breakdowns, and context. New articles publish Mondays. The first deep dive, next week, examines the three-year cliff and what it means that Montana went from record high to record low in the space of a single superintendent's contract.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.