Kindergarten Down 9% in Three Years

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In 2013, South Dakota enrolled 141 kindergartners for every 100 high school seniors. The incoming class was so much larger than the outgoing one that total enrollment grew every year for more than a decade. By 2025, that ratio had fallen to 110. The pipeline that fed a generation of enrollment growth is collapsing.

South Dakota lost 1,128 kindergartners in three years, a 9.3% decline from the 2022 peak of 12,082 to 10,954 in 2024-25. The decline has accelerated each year: 391 fewer in 2023, 308 in 2024, 429 in 2025. Ninety-two of 146 districts enrolled fewer kindergartners in 2025 than in 2022. Only 42 enrolled more.

A ratio that tells the future

The kindergarten-to-twelfth-grade ratio is the simplest leading indicator in education. When it sits well above 100, a district can expect years of growth as those large kindergarten classes move through the system. When it approaches 100, the entering class is no larger than the graduating one, and total enrollment stalls.

South Dakota's ratio hit 140.7 in 2013, meaning the state enrolled 41% more kindergartners than seniors. It held at or near that level through 2019, reaching 140.7 again in both 2018 and 2019. Then it broke. The ratio dropped from 140.7 in 2019 to 109.9 in 2025, a 30.8-point collapse in six years. At the current trajectory, it will cross below 100 within two to three years, meaning South Dakota would graduate more students than it enrolls for the first time.

The gap between the incoming and outgoing classes in raw numbers tells the same story. In 2025, South Dakota enrolled just 990 more kindergartners than twelfth graders. In 2013, that gap was 3,458.

What the 2025 grade staircase shows

Looking across all grades in 2025 reveals the pipeline inversion in a single snapshot. Kindergarten enrolled 10,954 students. First grade enrolled 9,847. Second grade: 10,201. The numbers climb through the middle grades, peaking at grade nine (11,041) and grade four (10,724), before tapering through grades 11 and 12. The shape of this staircase means elementary classrooms will keep shrinking for years even if kindergarten enrollment stabilizes tomorrow, because each rising cohort is smaller than the one ahead of it.

First grade enrollment has followed kindergarten downward. It peaked at 10,870 in 2013 (a level it matched in 2014) and has since fallen to 9,847 in 2025, a 9.4% decline. The kindergarten losses are not a one-year anomaly. They are propagating through the system.

Elementary is shrinking, high school is still growing

The consequences are already visible in the grade-band totals. Elementary enrollment (PK through fifth grade) peaked at 68,440 in 2018 and has fallen to 65,851, a loss of 2,589 students. High school enrollment (grades nine through twelve) moved in the opposite direction, reaching 42,133 in 2024 before dipping slightly to 41,507 in 2025.

Elementary's share of total enrollment fell from 50.6% in 2014 to 47.4% in 2025. High school's share rose from 27.9% to 29.9% over the same period. The crossover effect creates a temporary fiscal cushion: upper grades cost more per student to staff (specialized teachers, lab facilities, extracurriculars), so per-pupil revenue stretches slightly further in elementary-heavy years. That cushion is eroding.

Births are the root cause

South Dakota's birth rate has been falling for nearly two decades. State demographer Weiwei Zhang, presenting to the South Dakota House State Affairs Committee in January 2024, documented the trajectory: the birth rate fell from 15 per 1,000 in 2007 to 12 in recent years, a 20% decline. The pandemic made it worse. Zhang noted "a general trend of fewer live births in the past three years caused by COVID-19, with a 4% drop."

The timing lines up precisely. Children born in 2019 entered kindergarten in 2024-25. Children born in 2020, the year South Dakota recorded its lowest crude birth rate since 1910, will enter kindergarten in 2025-26. The kindergarten declines visible in the enrollment data today are the echo of birth declines from five years ago, and next year's entering class was born in an even weaker birth year.

South Dakota still leads the nation in fertility. Its 2023 rate of 65.6 births per 1,000 women aged 15-44 ranked first nationally, well above the national average of 54.5. But that rate is 16% below where it stood in 2013 (78.1 per 1,000). The state is declining from a high baseline, which means the losses show up in absolute enrollment numbers rather than in national rankings.

Sioux Falls feels it first

No district has lost more kindergartners than Sioux Falls^↗, the state's largest. The district enrolled 2,039 kindergartners in 2022 and 1,806 in 2025, a decline of 233, which accounts for more than a fifth of the statewide loss. Sioux Falls Business Manager Todd Vik told Sioux Falls Live that "the birth rate has been declining for the last seven or eight years in the city."

"The kindergarten enrollment so far is at 1,731 students, down 46 students from last year and accounts for more than half of the overall enrollment decrease." — Doug Morrison, Director of Data Services, Sioux Falls School District, via Sioux Falls Live

Morrison's figure of 1,731 reflects a later September count; the state's official enrollment file records 1,806 for Sioux Falls in 2024-25. Either way, the direction is the same: kindergarten classes that averaged about 2,000 students a decade ago now sit closer to 1,800.

Rapid City^↗ lost 115 kindergartners (-12.4%). Aberdeen^↗ lost 93 (-25.8%), the steepest percentage decline among larger districts. The losses are not confined to urban centers. Todd County^↗, home to the Rosebud Sioux Reservation, lost 56 (-23.3%). Brookings^↗, a university town, lost 54 (-15.9%). Pierre^↗, the state capital, lost 44 (-17.8%).

What total enrollment is not yet showing

South Dakota's total enrollment peaked at 141,429 in 2022 and has since declined to 138,861, a loss of 2,568 students. That statewide decline is real but moderate: 1.8% over three years. The kindergarten signal suggests the losses will deepen. Each year, a smaller kindergarten class enters the bottom of the pipeline while a larger class graduates from the top. The arithmetic is straightforward. Unless kindergarten enrollment reverses, total enrollment will continue falling, and the annual losses will grow as the smaller cohorts stack up through the grades.

Next fall's kindergarten class was born during 2020, the year South Dakota recorded its lowest crude birth rate since 1910. The pipeline is not broken. It is narrower, and the arithmetic runs in one direction: each smaller cohort entering the bottom stacks under the larger one ahead of it, compressing total enrollment year after year. Aberdeen lost a quarter of its kindergartners in three years. Todd County lost nearly the same. Even Sioux Falls, a district that added 4,800 students over two decades, cannot build its way out of a birth rate that has fallen 20% from its peak.

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