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116 Montana Districts Hit Record-Low Enrollment

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In 2023, 25 Montana school districts sat at their all-time low enrollment. Three years later, that number has more than quadrupled to 116. Livingston Elem^↗, a district that enrolled 436 students a decade ago, is down to 312 -- a 28.4% loss that has forced the kind of staffing arithmetic where every retirement becomes a question of whether to fill the position at all.

Livingston is not an outlier. One hundred sixteen of Montana's 390 districts, 29.7%, are at their lowest enrollment ever recorded in 2026. The list includes every one of the state's five largest elementary systems: Billings Elem^↗, Great Falls Elem^↗, Missoula Elem^↗, Helena Elem^↗, and Butte Elem^↗. Together those five districts serve 30,037 students, 21.1% of statewide enrollment, and all five hit their floor simultaneously.

The spike is recent

For most of the nine-year dataset, the number of districts at their all-time low hovered between 25 and 50 in any given year. In 2023, just 25 districts sat at record lows. Three years later that number has more than quadrupled.

The acceleration tracks the statewide trajectory. Montana peaked at 150,573 students in 2023, then lost 8,502 over three years, falling to 142,071, the lowest point in the dataset. The 2025 drop of 4,068 was the largest non-COVID decline on record. When the state sheds students that fast, the damage spreads: 106 districts set new record lows in 2026 alone.

Where the losses concentrate

The 116 districts at record lows collectively enroll 60,383 students, 42.5% of the state's total. These are not marginal rural outposts. The median district at its all-time low enrolls 131 students, slightly larger than the statewide median of 110.

Billings Elem has lost 1,000 students since its 2020 peak, an 8.5% decline. Missoula Elem is down 757 from its peak (13.2%), Great Falls Elem 614 (8.4%), and Helena Elem 504 (9.4%). In percentage terms, smaller districts have been hit harder: Livingston Elem^↗ has lost 28.4% of its peak enrollment, Laurel Elem^↗ 23.5%, and Hardin Elem^↗ 22.0%.

In Missoula, the enrollment math has already turned into staffing math. The district cut upwards of 100 positions in early 2024 to close an $8 million gap driven partly by 500 fewer elementary students since 2018, which Superintendent Micah Hill estimated at $3.4 million in lost state aid.

"Hard for me not to feel emotional about it. I don't have the magic wand or anything that's going to make these challenges just go away." -- Micah Hill, Missoula County Public Schools Superintendent, Montana Free Press, March 2024

Elementary districts are bearing the brunt

Montana's unusual split-district structure, where many communities run separate elementary and high school systems, makes the pattern visible in a way other states' data does not. Of 224 elementary districts, 72 (32.1%) are at all-time lows. Among 99 high school districts, 22 (22.2%) are at their floor. K-12 unified districts fall in between at 33.3%.

The gap makes structural sense. Montana's birth rate has been declining for years, and elementary districts feel those smaller kindergarten cohorts first. High school districts inherit the larger cohorts that entered the pipeline a decade ago. The split-district structure turns a single demographic wave into a visible lag: elementary districts hit bottom while high school districts hold steady or, in some cases, grow.

That lag explains why 48 districts, 12.3%, are at all-time highs. Bozeman H S leads at 2,844 students, having grown every year since 2018. Corvallis K-12, Whitefish H S, and Browning H S are also at peaks. But for elementary feeders in the same communities, the trajectory is already pointing down.

The funding formula amplifies the decline

Montana ties 81.3% of school funding to student enrollment through its ANB (Average Number Belonging) formula. Every lost student costs a district roughly $4,900 at the elementary level and $6,300 at the high school level, according to Flathead Beacon's analysis of per-pupil funding. For Billings Elem, a loss of 1,000 students represents approximately $4.9 million in reduced state aid, enough to trigger school closures.

At the same time, districts' ability to make up the difference through local levies is eroding. Lance Melton, executive director of the Montana School Boards Association, told Montana Free Press that passage rates have collapsed: in 2006, nearly all of 125 proposed levies passed. By 2025, districts proposed roughly half that number and voters rejected nearly half.

"We're down to a smidgeon here -- we're down to the point of 'why are people running levies any more?'" -- Lance Melton, Montana School Boards Association, Montana Free Press, February 2026

Helena Superintendent Rex Weltz described the situation as a tipping point: "We've been able to make ends meet for years under the formula. We're at a tipping point where we're no longer able to do that."

Housing costs are part of the mechanism, not all of it

Two forces are plausibly driving the enrollment decline, and they reinforce each other.

The first is demographic. The share of Montana's population that is school-aged has dropped from roughly 20% in the early 1990s to about 15%, a structural shift that no policy can quickly reverse. Fewer children are being born, and the cohorts entering kindergarten are smaller than those graduating from 12th grade.

The second is housing affordability. In Missoula, Bozeman, and Kalispell, administrators have pointed to steep home prices as a barrier for young families. Missoula's Superintendent Hill specifically cited families being priced out of their communities. The district's kindergarten enrollment fell to 457 in fall 2025, down from over 500 the prior year. Hill noted: "As those students matriculate through, the number of teachers needed in fifth grade is going to go down."

Distinguishing between these two forces matters for policy. Birth rate decline affects all districts. Housing affordability concentrates its effects in the communities that have grown most expensive. Belgrade Elem, in fast-growing Gallatin County adjacent to Bozeman, is at its all-time low despite surrounding population growth, down 14.4% from its peak, a signal that the families moving in may not have school-aged children or may be priced into districts where they do not enroll.

What to watch next

The 2025 Legislature enacted changes to public school funding flows, including Gov. Gianforte's $100 million investment in starting teacher pay. Whether that investment can stabilize staffing in districts losing students and levy revenue simultaneously is an open question.

A state-appointed Montana School Funding Commission is developing recommendations for the 2027 Legislature. The fundamental tension it faces: 116 districts are at record lows and losing the ANB revenue that pays for their teachers, while the levy system that once supplemented state funding is failing at rates not seen in two decades. Great Falls, which carries a $2.5 million shortfall, has begun offering an online learning platform to recapture students who left for homeschooling or private schools during the pandemic. So far, the platform has not reversed the district's trajectory. Great Falls Elem lost another 197 students in 2026.

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

Montana Lost 8,500 Students in Three Years

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The Billings school board voted 5-1 in January 2024 to close Washington Elementary. The building was not condemned. It was not damaged. The district simply could not justify staffing a school while enrollment kept falling.

That closure arrived in the middle of what has become Montana's sharpest enrollment contraction in at least a decade. Public school enrollment peaked at 150,573 in 2023 and has dropped every year since, falling to 142,071 in 2026. The three-year loss of 8,502 students, a 5.6% decline, wiped out the entire growth era that preceded it and then some. Montana added 3,801 students between 2018 and 2023. It has now lost more than twice that.

The 2026 figure is the lowest in the nine-year dataset.

The speed of the reversal

The sharpness matters as much as the direction. Montana gained students every non-COVID year from 2018 through 2023, adding 1,013 in 2019, 1,396 in 2020, and another 1,375 in 2023 after a strong post-pandemic bounce of 3,566 in 2022. Then 2024 brought a loss of 1,988 students, a figure Superintendent of Public Instruction Elsie Arntzen called "the first enrollment decrease after 12 consecutive years of increases."

That first drop turned out to be the mildest of three. The 2025 decline of 4,068 was the largest single-year loss in the dataset outside of COVID's 3,549-student drop in 2021. Then 2026 brought another 2,446-student loss. Combined, the three post-peak years have exceeded the COVID year's damage by a factor of 2.4.

The pattern is not a gradual slide. It is a reversal: five years of accumulation followed by three years of faster erasure.

Where the students disappeared

Billings Elem^↗, Montana's largest district at 10,737 students, has lost 1,000 since its 2020 peak, an 8.5% decline. Missoula Elem^↗ peaked that same year at 5,719 and has fallen to 4,962, a 13.2% loss. Helena Elem^↗ dropped from 5,340 to 4,836, losing 9.4%. Great Falls Elem^↗, which peaked a year earlier, has shed 614 students, or 8.4%.

All eight of Montana's largest districts are below their peak enrollment. Every one.

Across all 390 districts, 116 (29.7%) hit their all-time low in the current dataset in 2026. The list includes the five largest elementary districts in the state: Billings, Great Falls, Missoula, Helena, and Butte^↗. Those five alone enroll 30,037 students, roughly 21% of the state total, and all five are at historic lows simultaneously.

In Missoula, the enrollment decline translates directly to budget pressure. Superintendent Micah Hill told the Montana Free Press that the district faced an $8 million shortfall. The elementary system alone has lost nearly 500 students since 2018, costing roughly $3.4 million in state aid.

"Hard for me not to feel emotional about it." — Micah Hill, Missoula County Public Schools Superintendent, Montana Free Press, April 2024

The funding formula's arithmetic

Montana's school funding runs through Average Number Belonging, or ANB: a per-student measurement that determines state base aid and sets each district's maximum general fund budget. When students leave, the money follows them out the door. Great Falls Public Schools budget director Brian Patrick described how "as much as 90% of the district's general fund is already dedicated to staff salaries and benefits," leaving almost no cushion when enrollment dips. Under the formula, the statewide loss of 8,502 students translates to tens of millions in reduced funding capacity across districts.

The financial pain is compounded by an inflation gap. The Legislature has approved approximately 3% annual increases to per-student funding rates. Bozeman Superintendent Casey Bertram told reporters: "When inflation is well above that, you're going in the wrong direction and it's going to be very challenging." Consumer inflation reached 8% in 2022 while state funding adjustments stayed at roughly 3%.

Meanwhile, fixed costs do not shrink with enrollment. A school that loses 30 students still needs a principal, a custodian, a heating system. Helena Public Schools considered cutting nearly 100 positions if levy elections failed.

Who is gaining what Montana is losing

Not all of those 8,502 students vanished from the state. Some moved to non-public settings. OPI reported that 8,524 Montana students were homeschooled in 2023-24, a 9.3% increase over the prior year. Combined with 8,584 private school students, a total of 17,108 students sat outside public schools, up 2.4%.

Superintendent Arntzen attributed some of the shift to families "moving out of state and parents that desire more engagement in their children's education through homeschooling."

But homeschool growth accounts for only a fraction of the public school decline. The 725-student increase in homeschooling in 2023-24 covers roughly a third of that year's 1,988-student public school loss. The larger driver is demographic. Montana's population growth rate fell to 0.52% in 2024, its lowest since 2002, and the Bureau of Business and Economic Research at the University of Montana noted that deaths have exceeded births by 3,000 since the 2020 Census. The school-age share of Montana's population has dropped from 20% to 15% over 30 years, according to the Montana School Boards Association. Montana is growing older, not younger.

Nearly all of Montana's post-2020 population growth came from domestic migration, not births. The pandemic-era influx of remote workers to Bozeman and the Flathead Valley has cooled, and those who did arrive were disproportionately adults without school-age children. That pattern produces homebuyers, not kindergartners.

The elementary pipeline is collapsing

The decline is not evenly distributed across grade levels. Elementary enrollment (grades 1 through 5) has fallen from 57,717 in 2018 to 54,474 in 2026, a loss of 3,243 students (5.6%). High school enrollment (grades 9 through 12) grew from 42,116 to 43,736 over the same period, gaining 1,620 students (3.8%).

The most telling indicator is the ratio between first grade and twelfth grade. In 2018, Montana enrolled 118 first graders for every 100 twelfth graders. By 2026, that ratio flipped: 96 first graders for every 100 seniors. For the first time in the dataset, grade 12 is larger than grade 1, with 10,421 seniors and just 10,036 first graders. That inversion signals that the statewide decline has not yet fully hit high schools. When today's smaller elementary cohorts reach ninth grade, the high school buffer will disappear.

In Park County, where the Livingston Enterprise reported a community survey finding 83% of families want "flexible, self-directed and collaborative learning," local officials are developing a charter school, Park Pathways, targeting grades 7 through 12. Park County enrollment has dropped from 2,037 to 1,608 over 16 years, according to the Livingston Enterprise.

How far below trajectory

Had Montana continued growing at its pre-COVID pace (averaging 1,204 students per year from 2018 to 2020), the state would have enrolled 156,408 students in 2026. Instead, it enrolled 142,071. The gap is 14,337 students.

That gap represents the compound effect of pandemic disruption followed by structural decline. COVID cost Montana 3,549 students in a single year. The state bounced back aggressively, gaining 3,566 in 2022 and appearing to recover fully. But the recovery masked the beginning of a deeper slide. The bounce was temporary. The decline was not.

At the three-year average decline of 2,834 students per year, Montana would fall below 130,000 by 2031. Whether that pace holds depends on birth cohorts that are already small and a housing market that is not producing the affordable family homes that attract young households. Belgrade, a growing community south of Bozeman, is one of the few districts projecting enough elementary growth to need a new school. It is the exception, not the template.

The question for Montana's 390 districts, 330 of which enroll fewer than 500 students, is not whether enrollment will stabilize. It is whether a funding formula built for a growing state can sustain a shrinking one.

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