Public schools in Alabama’s Black Belt have been hemorrhaging students over the past two decades, an issue that goes far beyond education.

The second installment of Black Belt 2020, a series of issue briefs from the University of Alabama’s Education Policy Center and AL.com, tackles the issue, and looks at some of its core causes.

“Enrollment decline in the Black Belt is symptomatic of deeper challenges facing rural America,” the brief reads. “The loss of residents is hurting rural economies and prompting them to seek opportunity elsewhere. In the long-term, schools—and the students who stay—are left hanging.”

Public school enrollment in the 24 counties that make up the Black Belt region, as studied by the Education Policy Center at the University of Alabama, is down by nearly 24 percent, from nearly 140,000 students in the 1995-1996 school year to just under 107,000 in 2019-2020. School enrollment in the remaining 43 counties in Alabama actually increased by about four percent over that span.

[Can’t see the chart? Click here.]

Declining school enrollment has negative effects on the surrounding community, the brief, written by Stephen Katsinas, Noel Keeney Emily Jacobs and Hunter Whann, says. “The result is many school closures and the loss of community identity that goes with it in many small Black Belt towns.”

The issue of declining school enrollment in the region is multi-faceted, but starts with the issue examined in the first brief in the Black Belt 2020 series: Population decline.

“The migration shift of residents from Alabama’s rural Black Belt areas to more suburban areas where resources and supports such as hospitals, larger and new schools, tranquil parks, community recreation, plentiful job opportunities, and other quality of life factors exist is a real threat to the continued sustainability of rural Alabama,” said Jacqueline Brooks, Superintendent of Macon County Schools, said in the brief.

Brooks, a native of Macon County who graduated from the very school system she now heads, spoke to Alabama media members Monday, saying the issues underlying the Black Belt’s declining school enrollment go far beyond the schools themselves.

“Starting with the onset of the 21st century, somewhere around 2000, really peaking around 2010, we saw a huge migration of our students from our rural school districts into city and suburban school districts,” Brooks said. “We decided to give surveys to find out why this was happening.”

One of the main takeaways from those surveys, Brooks said, was that the education provided by the local schools was not among the top reasons people were leaving.

Healthcare, job opportunities and even high utility rates were all among the reasons parents listed as to why they left Macon County - and those trends are similar throughout the Black Belt.

There is no hospital in Macon County, Brooks said, or even something as simple as a Walmart. Both of those things feed into the county’s declining school enrollment and dropping population - it’s the second-fastest shrinking county in the fast-shrinking Black Belt.

And those issues aren’t singular to Macon. Of the 10 Alabama counties without a hospital, six are in the Black Belt.

And there are places in west Alabama that are even worse off than Macon, according to State Superintendent Eric Mackey - places where people have to drive across two county lines to get to a hospital, or where parents have to drive an hour or more one way to get to their job.

The lack of economic opportunity in the area means parents are often forced to work outside of the county, and often eventually move, Mackey said.

“It’s a chicken and egg problem,” Mackey said Monday. “We’ve got to create economic opportunities in these rural counties so that people will move back home and have good jobs, but we’ve got to get the people back so that we can attract these businesses. The businesses don’t want to come until the people are there, and the people don’t want to come until the jobs are there.”

These economic concerns play directly into school enrollment, and the health of a school system. Most of these rural school systems are heavily funded by sales tax. If there’s no Walmart in a county, for instance, that means people might drive to the next county over to spend their money, and the county schools won’t get any of the tax revenue. It’s a problem made worse by the coronavirus pandemic, Mackey said.

The lack of students and lack of funding mean schools are forced to offer more narrow curricula, which in turn leads to more people leaving.

Brooks has seen the toll such declines in enrollment can take on school systems first hand. She came back to her hometown of Tuskegee in the late 1990s after a stint as an educator in Florida. She came back as a middle school principal to a school with around 850 students.

“Now that particular school has around 300 students in it,” she said. “That’s 500 students. That’s a huge loss.”

According to data from the Education Policy Center, the Macon County school district as a whole shrank from nearly 4,300 in 1995-1996 to just over 1,800 in 2019-2020. A decline that significant has a price.

You can see changing enrollment in any of Alabama’s school systems in the table below.

“We once had, in our comprehensive high school, two Spanish teachers and one French teacher,” Brooks said. “We are now only able to offer foreign language through Access.” Access is a form of virtual learning used by Alabama schools. Brooks said she was happy to have such a tool at their disposal and called it a “needed and wonderful resource.”

“Of course we would love to be able to offer in-person teaching, but our average daily membership doesn’t allow us to offer the units to be able to do so,” she said. The number of units a school is able to offer is directly related to its enrollment. For these shrinking schools, the type of classes they can offer - and the teachers for those classes - is becoming more and more limited.

Recruiting teachers has been a challenge for many of these school systems, but retaining them has been even more challenging, Mackey said.

Mackey pointed to Brooks as a success story. “She was raised in the Black Belt, went to a very small school in Macon County,” he said. “She could have had a very successful and lucrative career in Florida and never moved back to Alabama, but what brought her back home was that call of home. She wanted to give back to that community that had given so much to her.”

He said that motivation of people wanting to come back to their home counties has often been the “winning formula” for getting teachers to come to and stay in Black Belt counties. Recruitment and the attrition of teachers remain a constant struggle.

Some policy decisions have helped - student loan forgiveness for certain teachers in some Black Belt counties for instance, has been successful in getting teachers in the door. But they usually leave between three and five years after arriving. Mackey also mentioned bonuses to keep teachers for longer, but said there’s a big difference between a one-time signing bonus and a true salary increase.

“The quality of life is more than just the school district. It’s city government, it’s grassroots effort, it’s a recipe of many things that equal the type of lifestyle and quality of life that residents are looking for today.

One potential policy step Mackey said could help Black Belt schools is looking at the state’s Supplemental Use Tax - Alabama’s online sales tax program. Under the current law, none of that money is required to go to schools - though counties can choose to allocate a percentage to schools. As more sales move online, this is one way of securing funding for rural schools.

He also mentioned economic incentives to bring more jobs to the Black Belt region.

The Education Policy Center’s data does not cover private schools, which present another issue for Black Belt school districts.

Black Belt 2020 is an ongoing series by AL.com and the Education Policy Center at the University of Alabama examining demographic, economic, and education issues, challenges, concerns, and options facing the Black Belt in Alabama.

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