In this series: South Dakota 2024-25 Enrollment.

For 12 consecutive years, South Dakota public schools grew. Every single year, from 2008 through 2019, the state added students — 17,058 in total, a 13.9% increase powered by Sioux Falls metro housing starts, refugee resettlement in meatpacking towns, and one of the nation's highest birth rates. After a brief COVID dip, enrollment bounced to a peak of 141,429 in 2021-22. That looked like resumption. It was not.

Then the South Dakota Department of Education posted its 2024-25 enrollment figures: 138,861 students, down 1,726 from the prior year. That is four times the loss of the year before, six times the COVID-year dip, and the largest single-year decline since the state began its growth streak nearly two decades ago. Whatever floor people thought they saw last year was not a floor.

What the numbers open up

The enrollment data covers 147 districts, from the state's two urban systems to micro-districts with fewer than two dozen students. Over the coming weeks, The SDEdTribune will unpack it in a series of data-driven articles. Here is what jumps out first.

A 12-year growth era is over, and decline is accelerating. South Dakota added students every year from 2008 through 2019. Post-COVID, it peaked in 2021-22 and has now posted three straight years of losses: 424, then 418, then 1,726. The quadrupling of losses in a single year is the story.

Hispanic enrollment nearly quadrupled in 17 years. One in 11 South Dakota public school students is now Hispanic, up from roughly 1 in 40 in 2008. In Huron^↗, Karen refugees and Hispanic meatpacking workers pushed the district from 80% white to 38% — while growing total enrollment 42%.

Rapid City^↗ just hit an all-time low. The state's second-largest district has lost nearly 2,000 students since 2012 while surrounding suburbs grew. Its kindergarten class has fallen 12% in three years.

By the numbers: 138,861 students statewide in 2024-25 — down 1,726 from the prior year, a 1.2% decline and the largest single-year loss in the state's modern enrollment history.

The threads we are following

27 districts just hit record lows. Nearly one in five South Dakota districts with sufficient data is at its lowest enrollment ever, including Rapid City. Most are rural and already enrolled fewer than 500 students.

Kindergarten is collapsing. The state lost 1,128 kindergartners between 2021-22 and 2024-25, a 9.3% decline. That shrinking pipeline foreshadows years of further total enrollment loss before today's seniors graduate out.

The Sioux Falls donut keeps expanding. Harrisburg^↗ has never lost a student in 18 years of data. It has grown 273% and now enrolls more students than Aberdeen or Watertown. But growth is decelerating, and 870 students who live within Sioux Falls' boundaries now attend ring district schools.

What comes next

Each of these threads will get its own article with charts, district-level breakdowns, and context. New articles publish Wednesdays. The first deep dive, next week, looks at how a state that grew for 12 straight years ended up losing students faster than it did during COVID.

The enrollment figures come from the South Dakota Department of Education. The data covers fall enrollment headcounts for public school districts statewide.

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