Livingston Elem - EdTribune MT - Montana Education Data

Livingston Lost 28% of Its Students. The Town Has Never Been More Popular.

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Park County's economy runs on Yellowstone. Four and a half million visitors a year pass through on their way to the north entrance, filling hotels and restaurants in a town of 8,000 that sits where the Yellowstone River bends through the Absaroka Range. Median home values in the county have nearly doubled since 2020. New breweries and art galleries line Main Street.

Livingston Elem^↗, the district that serves this town, enrolled 1,000 students in 2017-18. In 2025-26, it enrolled 716. That is a loss of 284 students, or 28.4%, a rate of decline nearly nine times the statewide average. Among Montana districts with at least 200 students, only two have shrunk faster.

The paradox is not subtle. Livingston is losing children precisely because the same forces that made it prosperous have made it unaffordable for families with children.

The trajectory

The decline has been almost unbroken. In six of the past eight year-over-year transitions, Livingston Elem lost students. The single worst year was 2020-21, when 123 students disappeared in one cycle, a 12.9% drop that coincided with both pandemic disruption and the first surge of remote-worker in-migration that reshaped Park County's housing market.

A brief rebound of 26 students in 2021-22 did not hold. The district has lost 138 students in the four years since, including 68 in 2024-25 and 32 in 2025-26.

Park H S^↗, the high school district serving the same community, tells a different story. It enrolled 447 students in 2017-18 and 419 in 2025-26, a decline of just 6.3%. The high school's relative stability makes the elementary collapse more striking: the pipeline feeding it is thinning fast.

Combined, Livingston's two districts have gone from 1,447 to 1,135 students, a loss of 312, or 21.6%.

A housing market that replaced families with retirees

Montana's housing market helps explain why. Statewide, the median residential property value rose 66% in four years, from $228,000 in 2020 to $378,000 in 2024. Monthly payments on a median home more than doubled, from roughly $921 to $2,173, while per-capita income grew 26%.

Livingston sits 25 miles east of Bozeman on Interstate 90. For years it served as an affordable alternative to Gallatin County's overheated market. But remote workers, retirees, and second-home buyers who arrived during the pandemic pushed Park County's median home price past $525,000 by late 2024. Park County's median age is 46, well above the national figure of 38.9, consistent with a community where older in-migrants are displacing younger families rather than joining them.

The result: Bozeman's combined enrollment (elementary and high school) grew 8.3% since 2017-18. Livingston's shrank 21.6% over the same period. Two communities connected by a 25-mile highway, moving in opposite directions.

More than housing

Housing costs are not the only force. The Livingston Enterprise reported in 2025 that district leaders see families choosing alternatives to traditional public schools at rising rates.

"We're just seeing more and more students disengage from traditional school structures. We've seen this in our early warning system where students are at risk for credit deficiency or non-graduation. We've also seen increasing attendance concerns especially since 2020 with a lot more unexcused absences." — Hannah Scheiderer, Livingston Public Schools psychologist, Livingston Enterprise

The district's own survey data found 83% of families prefer flexible, self-directed learning and 92% believe students need project-based and work-based learning opportunities. Homeschool enrollment in Park County, while modest (146 students in 2024-25), represents an additional draw on the public school headcount. Montana's HB 549 charter programs, passed in 2023, have not yet opened in Livingston, but the broader cultural shift toward alternative schooling models compounds the demographic pressure.

Where Livingston ranks

Among the 133 Montana districts that enrolled at least 200 students in 2017-18, Livingston Elem's 28.4% decline ranks third. Only White Sulphur Springs K-12 (-34.7%) and Heart Butte K-12 (-33.0%) fell faster, and both are substantially smaller. Livingston is by far the largest district in the fastest-declining tier.

For context, Montana as a whole declined 3.2% over this period. Livingston's rate is 8.9 times the state average. Even Bozeman Elem, just down the highway and facing many of the same regional dynamics, declined only 2.5%.

The funding arithmetic

Montana funds schools primarily through Average Number Belonging (ANB), a per-student formula that delivers roughly $4,900 per elementary student and $6,300 per high school student. The state offers a three-year averaging option that softens the blow of sudden enrollment drops, but it cannot indefinitely cushion a district losing students at Livingston's pace.

At 284 fewer elementary students and the base ANB rate, the estimated state aid reduction approaches $1.4 million. Staff salaries consume as much as 90% of general fund budgets in Montana districts, leaving little room to absorb losses without cutting positions. The same Montana Free Press investigation found districts statewide struggling with a structural mismatch: the legislature approved roughly 3% annual inflationary increases to per-student rates while actual inflation exceeded 8% in 2022.

Gateway towns and missing children

Livingston is not the only Yellowstone-adjacent community losing students. Gardiner Elem, the district at the park's north entrance, has fallen from 106 to 93 students since 2017-18. Big Timber Elem, the next town east on I-90, dropped 21.9%. The pattern is consistent across Park County and its neighbors: tourism-driven economies that attract visitors, retirees, and remote professionals while pricing out the working families whose children fill school buildings.

The Livingston case is the starkest version of a dynamic visible across the Mountain West: communities that are simultaneously growing and emptying, depending on whether you measure prosperity by tax revenue or by the number of kindergarteners who show up in September. The town's economy has never been stronger. Its elementary school has never been smaller.

Livingston Elem has averaged a loss of 35 students per year over the past nine years. At that rate, it falls below 600 by the 2029-30 school year, a threshold that puts school configuration and staffing decisions on the table for a community that has never had more tourists and fewer kindergarteners at the same time.

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

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.