Todd County - EdTribune SD - South Dakota Education Data

A High School That Didn't Exist Built Pine Ridge's 49% Enrollment Surge

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In a state where most districts are shrinking, one school district on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation grew by 564 students between 2007 and 2025, a 49.4% increase. The Oglala Lakota County^↗ School District now enrolls 1,706 students, up from 1,142 eighteen years ago, making it the 10th-fastest-growing district in South Dakota among those with at least 100 students.

The headline number is real but requires unpacking. Nearly all of that growth arrived in a single year, and most of it came from a building that did not exist before 2020.

Lakota Tech changed the math

In the 2018-19 school year, the district enrolled 1,333 students. One year later, that number jumped to 1,811, a gain of 478 students, or 35.9%, in 12 months. That is not organic population growth. It is a structural change: the opening of Lakota Tech High School, the first career and technical education high school on any Indian reservation in the United States.

Before Lakota Tech, the district's high school enrollment hovered below 100. In 2018-19, just 96 students were enrolled in grades 9 through 12 across the entire district. Most reservation teenagers attended Bureau of Indian Education schools like Pine Ridge School or private institutions like Red Cloud Indian School, neither of which report through the state system. The opening of Lakota Tech in fall 2020 added 298 high school students to the district's rolls in its first year. By 2024-25, the school enrolled 498 students, making it the district's second-largest campus.

The decomposition tells the story plainly. Strip out the high school and the district's elementary and middle school enrollment grew from 1,068 in 2009 to 1,208 in 2025, a 13.1% gain. Still growth, and still against the grain of rural South Dakota. But not 49%.

A $26 million bet on career education

Lakota Tech was built through a partnership between the district and the state of South Dakota, announced in 2019. Governor Kristi Noem described the project as an effort to "bolster the area's workforce and empower students with real-life skills and career opportunities to help them succeed after graduation."

The $26.2 million facility was financed in part through $23.5 million in New Markets Tax Credits. The district itself acknowledged the school "would not have proceeded as planned" without that federal financing mechanism.

The school was designed for 400 students across 90,000 square feet, offering academies in health sciences, business, industrial arts, and public safety. It opened in August 2020, expecting 300 students and enrolling 311. By 2024-25, enrollment reached 498, exceeding the building's original design capacity.

The context for why a career-focused high school mattered here is grim. Before Lakota Tech, only about 25% of eighth graders in the district completed high school. Nationally, CTE programs report 93% graduation rates.

Five schools, 2,000 square miles

The district spans 22 communities across roughly 2,000 square miles of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Its five campuses range from Wolf Creek School (572 students) to Red Shirt School (47 students), separated by distances that make a 30-mile bus ride a typical morning.

The rapid expansion created operational strain. By late 2023, the district had 101 job openings, 51 of them at Lakota Tech alone. The bottleneck was not applicants but housing: there is almost nowhere for teachers to live on the reservation. The district became a landlord, building 15 single-family homes and planning 12 duplexes through a state prison construction program to house incoming staff.

A reservation outlier among reservation districts

Oglala Lakota County's growth contrasts sharply with other reservation-serving districts in South Dakota. Todd County^↗, serving the Rosebud Reservation, has been essentially flat since 2007, declining 1.1% from 1,977 to 1,956. Bennett County^↗, on the southern edge of Pine Ridge, lost 23.4% of its enrollment over the same period, falling from 555 to 425. Eagle Butte^↗, on the Cheyenne River Reservation, grew 37.8%, though from a much smaller base of 267 students.

The divergence raises a question about what is being measured. Oglala Lakota County did not gain 564 children who were not being educated before. Most of the high school students enrolling at Lakota Tech were previously attending BIE schools, private institutions, or were among the roughly 75% of students who dropped out before completing high school. What changed is not the number of children on the reservation but which system counts them.

That distinction matters for understanding the 49% figure. It is a real enrollment increase in the state's public school system, reflecting a genuine expansion of the district's educational footprint. It is not, however, evidence that 564 more children moved to Pine Ridge.

What sits beneath the numbers

The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is one of the poorest places in the United States. The official poverty rate is 53.75%, and per capita income is $7,773, roughly a quarter of the national average. The median age is 25.4 years, and 42.4% of the population is under 20, nearly double the statewide proportion.

That young population is a structural enrollment advantage. While much of rural South Dakota faces declining birth cohorts, the reservation's demographics push in the opposite direction. The district's K-8 enrollment grew 13.1% between 2009 and 2025 even without any structural change, a rate that most South Dakota districts would envy.

The year-over-year pattern shows two distinct eras. Before 2020, the district oscillated, gaining students in some years and losing them in others, with four consecutive years of decline from 2016 to 2019 that dropped enrollment from 1,498 to 1,333. The 2020 jump reset the baseline entirely. Since then, enrollment has fluctuated between 1,696 and 1,853, settling at 1,706 in 2024-25.

The question Lakota Tech cannot answer yet

The school's first cohorts are now graduating. Whether a CTE-focused curriculum on a reservation with 53% poverty actually changes long-term outcomes for Lakota students is the question that enrollment data cannot answer. Graduation rates, employment outcomes, and college persistence will take years to measure.

What the enrollment data does show is that building a public high school on Pine Ridge created a measurable shift in where reservation students are counted. The district went from the 20th-largest in South Dakota in 2019 to the 17th in 2025. Lakota Tech alone enrolls 498 students, more than what 95 of the state's 147 districts enroll in total. For a school that did not exist five years ago, in a county with the lowest per capita income in the nation, that is a fact worth watching.

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South Dakota Schools Lost 13 Points of White Share in 17 Years

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In the 2007-08 school year, roughly 82 of every 100 students in South Dakota's public schools were white. By 2024-25, that figure had fallen to 69. The 13.2 percentage-point drop did not happen because white families left the state en masse. It happened because South Dakota's schools added 15,864 students overall while white enrollment fell by 5,275, and every other racial group grew.

The transformation registered most sharply in the state's two anchor cities. Sioux Falls^↗, the largest district, dropped from 77.1% white to 54.1%. In Huron^↗, a small city 110 miles to the northwest, white share plummeted from 80.2% to 38.3%, driven by Karen refugees from Myanmar and Hispanic meatpacking workers who turned a shrinking prairie town into one of the most diverse school districts in the Northern Plains.

Where the Growth Came From

Hispanic enrollment nearly quadrupled, rising from 3,279 students in 2007-08 to 12,845 in 2024-25, a gain of 9,566 students and a 291.7% increase. Hispanic students now compose 9.3% of enrollment, up from 2.7%. Multiracial enrollment, a category that did not exist in the 2007-08 reporting, reached 8,681 students and 6.3% of total enrollment. Black enrollment rose 70.4%, from 2,964 to 5,051. Asian enrollment grew 62.3%, from 1,422 to 2,308.

Native American enrollment, long the state's largest minority group at 11.8% of total enrollment in 2007-08, held essentially flat in absolute terms, declining just 194 students to 14,283. But its share slipped to 10.3% as other groups grew around it. Hispanic enrollment, at 9.3%, is now just one percentage point behind Native American enrollment as the state's second-largest demographic group.

The multiracial surge deserves a caveat. The 2020 Census recorded a 170% increase in South Dakotans identifying as multiracial, a jump that state demographer Weiwei Zhang attributed to both interracial families and changes in how people choose to identify. In school enrollment data, the multiracial category appeared after 2008 and cannot be traced before then. Some portion of the 8,681 multiracial students in 2024-25 would have been counted in a single-race category under the earlier reporting system, meaning the white decline and the multiracial rise are partly linked by reclassification rather than new arrivals.

The Sioux Falls Shift

Sioux Falls enrolled 24,841 students in 2024-25, up 17.4% from 21,157 in 2007-08. The district grew, but the composition of that growth was lopsided. Hispanic enrollment tripled from 1,319 to 4,213, gaining 2,894 students. Black enrollment nearly doubled, adding 1,544 students to reach 3,339. Multiracial enrollment added 2,055 students. White enrollment, meanwhile, fell by 2,866 to 13,445.

The result: Sioux Falls went from a district where more than three in four students were white to one where barely more than half are. DeeAnn Konrad, the district's community relations coordinator, told Sioux Falls Live that diversity has increased "each year now for over 20-plus years." The district now reports more than 100 languages spoken across its schools and more than 3,000 students learning English as a second or third language.

Part of the white decline in Sioux Falls reflects not departure from the region but movement within it. Harrisburg^↗, a fast-growing suburb south of Sioux Falls, gained 3,164 white students over the same period, the largest white enrollment increase of any district in the state. Brandon Valley^↗, another Sioux Falls suburb, added 1,288. Tea Area^↗ gained 855. The Sioux Falls metro is not losing white families. It is sorting them.

The Huron Exception

Huron's transformation is different in kind. The district enrolled 2,150 students in 2007-08 and 3,042 in 2024-25, growing 41.5% while most rural South Dakota districts shrank. White enrollment fell from 1,724 to 1,164, but what replaced it was not suburban spillover. It was international migration.

Asian enrollment in Huron surged from 83 to 610, a 634.9% increase driven almost entirely by Karen refugees from Myanmar. When Dakota Provisions opened a turkey processing plant in 2005, the company began recruiting Karen refugees from the Twin Cities to fill jobs. The community chose to embrace the newcomers.

"Do we want to embrace this and try to make our community survive and thrive ... or just stay the status quo?" -- Mayor Paul Aylward, SDPB, 2015

Mark Heuston, the plant's HR director, told PBS NewsHour that "without the Karen people, we probably would not be able to run the turkey plant." The facility processes 20,000 turkeys daily. Hispanic enrollment rose simultaneously, from 209 to 1,066, as food processing jobs attracted Latino workers alongside the Karen community. Today, 35.0% of Huron's students are Hispanic and 20.1% are Asian. Only 38.3% are white.

Sixteen districts statewide now have majority-minority enrollment, up from 12 in 2007-08. Most are on or adjacent to Native American reservations: Oglala Lakota County^↗ (0.8% white), Todd County^↗ (1.0%), Eagle Butte (1.4%), McLaughlin (1.5%). Huron stands out as the only district whose flip was driven primarily by immigration rather than proximity to a reservation. It also flipped faster than any other, dropping 42 percentage points of white share in 17 years.

A Statewide Pattern with Local Engines

Hispanic growth concentrated in predictable locations: Sioux Falls added 2,894 Hispanic students, Rapid City Area^↗ added 959, and Huron added 857. But smaller communities saw proportionally larger changes. Aberdeen^↗'s Hispanic enrollment grew from 46 to 471, a 923.9% increase. Harrisburg went from 16 Hispanic students to 422. Mitchell went from 58 to 303.

These patterns track national trends of Hispanic population growth in rural Midwestern communities anchored by food processing and agriculture. South Dakota's birth rate has fallen from 15 per 1,000 in 2007 to 12 recently, with white women's fertility rate (62.2 per 1,000 women of childbearing age) running lower than rates for Hispanic women (83.4) and Native American women (92.4), according to March of Dimes data. Differential birth rates, combined with immigration-driven population growth in meatpacking communities, are the most likely drivers of the enrollment share shift.

White enrollment losses, meanwhile, concentrated in the state's established cities. Rapid City Area lost 3,128 white students, the most of any district. Sioux Falls lost 2,866. Watertown^↗ lost 814. But these losses were partly offset by suburban white gains in Harrisburg (+3,164), Brandon Valley (+1,288), and Tea Area (+855), suggesting geographic redistribution rather than net out-migration from the state.

What the Data Cannot Show

South Dakota's race data has a significant gap: no race or ethnicity information is available at any level for the years 2011 through 2020. The comparison here relies on 2007-08 as a starting point and 2024-25 as an endpoint, with no visibility into whether the shift was gradual or concentrated in particular years. The 2022 and 2023 school years are also incomplete, missing Native American and Pacific Islander counts at the state aggregation level, which makes year-over-year tracking within the recent window unreliable for those groups.

The multiracial category introduces additional uncertainty. Students who might have checked "white" and one other box in 2008 could now be counted as multiracial, which would amplify both the white decline and the multiracial rise without any actual change in who is attending school. The degree of this reclassification effect is impossible to quantify from enrollment data alone.

The Service Question

The demographic shift carries operational weight regardless of its causes. When Sioux Falls reports that 44.6% of students come from diverse backgrounds and enrolls more than 3,000 English language learners, the instructional model is structurally different from a district that is 82% white. English learner programs, multilingual family outreach, and culturally responsive instruction all carry per-pupil costs that exceed general education. Sioux Falls is already facing a $1.5 million budget shortfall as total enrollment plateaus while demand for specialized services continues to rise.

Sioux Falls is already facing a $1.5 million budget shortfall as total enrollment plateaus while demand for ELL services rises. It has 100 languages in its buildings and 3,000 students learning English. Harrisburg went from 16 Hispanic students to 422 in 17 years and is diversifying faster than any suburb in the state. The demographic shift is not arriving. It arrived. What has not arrived, in most districts, is the staffing and programming to match it.

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24 South Dakota Districts Hit Record Lows

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Rapid City Area Schools^↗, the second-largest district in South Dakota, enrolled 12,040 students in 2024-25. That is the lowest figure in the district's recorded history, down 13.9% from its 2012 peak of 13,982. Rapid City is not alone. Twenty-four South Dakota school districts are at their all-time enrollment lows, and collectively they serve 25,019 students, 18.0% of the state's total. At the same time, 20 districts sit at all-time highs, nearly all of them in the Sioux Falls^↗ suburban ring.

The split captures a state pulling apart. South Dakota added students for 12 consecutive years, from 122,384 in 2006-07 through 2018-19, dipped briefly in 2019-20, then rebounded to a peak of 141,429 in 2021-22. That growth era is over. The state has now declined for three straight years, losing 2,568 students since the peak, with 2024-25's drop of 1,726 the steepest in at least 18 years.

The two South Dakotas

The 24 districts at record lows and 20 at record highs occupy different economic universes. The record-high districts are overwhelmingly in the Sioux Falls metro, led by Harrisburg^↗ (6,398 students, up 272.8% since 2006-07), Brandon Valley^↗ (5,206, up 72.5%), and Tea Area^↗ (2,514, up 111.3%). Sioux Falls itself has essentially plateaued at 24,841, down slightly from its 2022-23 peak of 25,228. The growth is in the suburban ring, not the city center.

The record-low districts span western South Dakota, reservation communities, and small towns. After Rapid City, the largest are Watertown^↗ (3,425, down 14.7% from its 2015 peak), Todd County^↗ (1,956, down 9.3% from 2020), and Custer^↗ (854, down 10.6% from 2018). Several smaller districts have lost a quarter to two-thirds of their peak enrollment: Bowdle^↗ is down to 45 students from a peak of 147, a 69.4% decline. Newell^↗ has fallen 42.4%, Lead-Deadwood^↗ 34.0%.

Rapid City's long slide

Rapid City peaked at 13,982 students in 2011-12 and has been unable to recover. The district has now declined in six consecutive reporting years (excluding 2020-21, for which data is incomplete). It lost 800 students in the single year from 2018-19 to 2019-20, then continued bleeding at a slower pace: 66, 310, 120, and 273 in the years since.

The losses are not simply a function of population decline. A Rapid City Area Schools board member told the Rapid City Journal that "people are moving here with their families" but "not enrolling in our schools, or they're pulling them out." The district has lost approximately 1,700 students over the past decade while homeschool and private school enrollment has grown.

That pattern is statewide. South Dakota's home-schooled student population rose 143% from 4,333 to 10,536 between 2015-16 and 2023-24, the largest proportional increase of any state reporting data for every year in that range. At roughly $7,000 per student in state funding, the shift represents tens of millions in annual revenue that has moved out of the public system.

Where the growth went

While Rapid City contracted, the Sioux Falls suburban ring exploded. Harrisburg added an average of 260 students per year over the past 18 years, growing from 1,716 to 6,398. It has built nearly one new building every two years to keep pace, at an average construction cost of $166 per square foot, well below the $287 regional average.

Brandon Valley and Tea Area followed a similar trajectory, more than doubling since 2006-07. Sioux Falls, by contrast, has grown just 24.2% over the same period and posted its second consecutive year of decline in 2024-25.

The pattern is a classic suburban donut: the core district plateaus or declines while surrounding communities absorb new residential development. South Dakota's unrestricted open enrollment policy allows families to send children to any public school in the state regardless of residence, which may accelerate the sorting. Families who remain within Sioux Falls city limits can still enroll in Harrisburg or Brandon Valley.

Small districts and reservation schools

The deepest percentage declines are concentrated in districts under 500 students. Lead-Deadwood, the historic Black Hills mining district, has fallen from 894 to 590 students since 2011, a 34.0% decline and the steepest among mid-sized districts at record lows. Superintendent Dr. Erik Person attributed the challenges to housing shortages, telling KOTA Territory News that recent population growth in the Lead and Deadwood area "doesn't really help with enrollment" because many newcomers are retirees buying second homes.

Todd County, which serves the Rosebud Indian Reservation, has declined from 2,156 to 1,956 since 2019-20. The district faces compounding challenges beyond enrollment numbers: chronic absenteeism reached 71% in 2023-24, with the median household income of $33,800 less than half the state average. Todd County High School Principal Randy Pirner told Dakota News Now that "COVID set us back 10 years because kids who aren't going to school in kindergarten aren't going to be going to school when we get them in high school."

Watertown, the state's seventh-largest district at 3,425 students, is considering closing one of its five elementary schools as enrollment continues to fall. The district has lost 591 students, 14.7%, since its 2015 peak, driven in part by declining birth rates in Codington County.

The acceleration problem

The year-over-year data tells the sharpest story. South Dakota gained between 1,000 and 2,200 students every year from 2009-10 through 2018-19, with smaller gains in the two years before and a dip of 288 in 2019-20. The 2021-22 rebound of 2,275 looked like a return to form. Instead, the state lost 424 in 2022-23, 418 in 2023-24, and 1,726 in 2024-25. The decline is accelerating: last year's loss was four times larger than either of the two preceding years.

Statewide, exactly half of South Dakota's 146 districts with comparable data declined between 2019-20 and 2024-25 (73 districts), while 72 grew and one was flat. The losses and gains nearly cancel out in aggregate, but the distribution is lopsided: declining districts collectively lost 4,490 students while growing districts gained 4,416. The state's net loss of 74 students over five years masks deep geographic divergence.

South Dakota's state demographer, Weiwei Zhang, has projected that children will drop below 20% of the state's population by 2030, while adults over 65 will surpass 20%. The state's birth rate has fallen from 15 per 1,000 in 2007 to 12 per 1,000. Even with relatively high fertility by national standards, the kindergarten pipeline is shrinking.

Redfield^↗ has declined for eight consecutive years. Lead-Deadwood for seven. Rapid City for six. None show signs of turning around. For Bowdle, at 45 students, the arithmetic is existential: one more family leaving could trigger the state's mandatory reorganization planning threshold. For Watertown, at 3,425 and eyeing an elementary school closure, the decisions are about which building goes dark and which bus routes get cut. None of these choices can be reversed easily if the students return. Most will not.

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South Dakota Gained Students During COVID. Now the Bill Is Coming Due.

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Most states lost students during the pandemic. South Dakota added them.

Between the 2019-20 and 2021-22 school years, public school enrollment in South Dakota grew by 2,275 students, a 1.6% gain, at a time when national public school enrollment fell 2.7%. Eighty-seven of the state's 149 districts gained enrollment. The Sioux Falls^↗ suburbs boomed. The state's long growth streak, which had already added 17,058 students over the prior 12 years, appeared to have survived a shock that broke enrollment trajectories in nearly every other state.

That growth has now reversed. South Dakota hit a peak of 141,429 students in the 2021-22 school year and has declined every year since, falling to 138,861 in 2024-25. The 2024-25 loss of 1,726 students is the largest single-year decline in the dataset, more than double the two prior years' losses combined.

The growth that wasn't supposed to end

South Dakota grew in 12 consecutive years from 2007-08 through 2018-19, adding an average of 1,420 students per year. The only interruption before the current decline was a minor 288-student dip in 2019-20. Through COVID, enrollment surged to a new high of 141,429.

The source of that gain was concentrated. The ten-district Sioux Falls metro area accounted for 1,398 of the 2,275-student statewide increase, or 61.5% of the total. Harrisburg^↗ alone added 463 students. Tea Area^↗ gained 317. Brandon Valley^↗ added 267. The Sioux Falls School District, already the state's largest at 24,855, grew by 269.

On the losing side, the declines were scattered among smaller communities. Aberdeen^↗ lost 151 students. Watertown^↗ lost 148. Todd County^↗, home to the Rosebud Sioux Reservation, lost 112. Rapid City Area Schools^↗, the state's second-largest district, shed 66 students during the COVID window, continuing a decline that began years earlier.

A suburban engine and a rural drag

The divergence between metropolitan and rural South Dakota long predates COVID, but the pandemic sharpened it. Since 2007, the Sioux Falls metro has grown 44.1%, adding more than 13,000 students. The rest of the state has grown just 3.0%.

Harrisburg's trajectory captures the dynamic in miniature. The district enrolled 1,716 students in 2007. By 2024-25, it reached 6,398, a 272.8% increase over 18 years. It is now the third-largest district in the state and, according to the Sioux Falls Chamber of Commerce, "has for years been the fastest-growing school district in the state."

Rapid City, by contrast, peaked at 13,982 in 2012 and has declined in nine of the 13 years since, falling to 12,040 in 2024-25. That is a loss of 1,942 students, or 13.9%, over a period when the state as a whole was still growing. Homeschooling registrations in the Rapid City district tripled from 481 to 1,681 between 2013 and 2023.

What pulled families in

South Dakota's COVID-era enrollment gain tracked a broader population surge. The Dakota Institute found that the state gained roughly 6,300 net domestic migrants between 2020 and 2021, along with $450 million in additional income from those households. Between 2021 and 2022, net domestic migration reached 8,424, and the state's population growth rate hit 1.52%, four times the national average and fifth-fastest in the country.

The timing coincides with South Dakota's approach to the pandemic. While schools did close in spring 2020, the state prioritized face-to-face instruction for the 2020-21 school year. By September 2020, most schools were operating in person, and by June 2021 all schools had returned to in-person learning. In-migration from states with longer school closures is a plausible contributing factor, though enrollment data alone cannot distinguish between new arrivals and families who might otherwise have left.

South Dakota also entered the pandemic with demographic tailwinds that most states lacked. The state's total fertility rate is the highest in the nation and the only one close to the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. Births have remained "fairly stable" even as national birth rates fell, ranking behind only Utah and Texas.

The reversal: 2,568 students gone in three years

The post-2022 decline has accelerated sharply. The state lost 424 students in 2022-23, another 418 in 2023-24, and then 1,726 in 2024-25. That final figure is larger than any annual gain the state posted during the growth era except for 2010-12 and 2016.

Two forces are converging. The migration boom that fed suburban growth has cooled. Net domestic migration dropped from over 3,000 in 2021-22 to roughly 600 in 2023-24, a decline of more than 80%. Fewer families are moving in.

At the same time, alternative instruction is pulling students out. South Dakota's alternative instruction enrollment hit 12,433 in 2025-26, up from roughly 5,342 before the pandemic, a 130% increase. That 12,433 figure represents 7.6% of all school-age children receiving an education in the state. Governor Larry Rhoden framed the shift as a feature: "Regardless of where they receive their education, my goal as governor is to support innovation."

Kindergarten is the leading indicator

The clearest signal of what comes next is in the kindergarten numbers. South Dakota's K enrollment rebounded from a COVID-year dip of 11,452 (2019-20) to a high of 12,082 (2021-22), then fell in each of the next three years, reaching 10,954 in 2024-25. That is 498 fewer kindergartners than during the COVID year itself, and the lowest K enrollment since 2009.

South Dakota's birth rate, while still the highest in the nation, fell to 12.2 per 1,000 population in 2023, the lowest in the state's recorded history. Each kindergarten cohort that enters smaller than the 12th-grade class it eventually replaces locks in further total enrollment decline. In 2024-25, the state enrolled 10,954 kindergartners but graduated 12th-grade classes of comparable or larger size, a pipeline contraction that compounds every year.

What the COVID exception cost

South Dakota's COVID-era gain bought time, but it may have also masked a structural transition. The state's growth era was never primarily about natural increase. It was powered by in-migration, concentrated in one metro area, during a period of unusual national disruption. When migration slowed, the underlying arithmetic reasserted itself.

In-migration has dropped from over 3,000 net domestic arrivals in 2021-22 to roughly 600 in 2023-24. Alternative instruction adds another 1,000 students per year to the non-public rolls. Harrisburg and Tea Area are still growing, but they are running out of room to offset what the rest of the state is losing.

South Dakota watched its neighbors hemorrhage students during COVID and thought it had dodged the national trend. The last three years carry a blunt message: the state did not avoid the enrollment decline. It delayed it.

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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.

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