Public schools added 121,000 employees last year, even as they served 110,000 fewer students.

This is a continuation of recent trends. In per-student terms, public schools have hit new all-time staffing highs in each of the last three years.

蜜桃影视鈥檚 art and technology director, Eamonn Fitzmaurice, and I have been following these trends and mapping out how they鈥檙e changing across the country. We鈥檝e now updated our charts through the 2023-24 school year. Click on the map below to see what's happening in your community. 

Student/Teacher Ratio Growth

As in previous years, we screened out very small districts and those without sufficient data (marked in black). That allowed us to examine staffing and enrollment trends for over 9,500 districts, comprising 92% of K-12 students nationwide. We then compared the teacher and student counts from 2023-24 鈥� the most recent available 鈥� with the same figures for 2016-17. 

About one-quarter of districts had fewer teachers per student last year than they did seven years earlier. Those are shaded in orange or yellow. Districts in Alaska, Nevada and especially Florida are predominantly orange on the map, meaning they have higher student-to-teacher ratios than they did before the pandemic.

But many more districts are shaded blue or gray, meaning they serve fewer 鈥� or a lot fewer 鈥� students per teacher than they did seven years earlier. Overall, three-quarters of districts fell into one of these categories.

At the most extreme are places where student enrollment declined while the district added staff. There were almost 3,000 districts in this category. Chicago, for example, lost 55,000 students while adding 4,200 teachers. Fairfax County, in Virginia, lost 7,000 students but added almost 700 new teachers.

Slightly less extreme are districts that shrunk their staff counts, but not as fast as they lost students. For example, Santa Ana Unified in California reduced its teacher count by 14%, but it suffered a 30% decline in student enrollment. Similarly, San Antonio, Texas, reduced its teacher count by 7% as student enrollment fell 15%.

Another group of districts gained students, but they increased their teacher counts even faster. Chesterfield County in Virginia served 7% more students with 22% more teachers. Also in Virginia, Loudon County added 27% more teachers to serve 4% more students.

Thanks to an infusion of $190 billion in federal relief funds, schools have been on a hiring spree over the last few years. You can visibly see the effects of the federal money in some of the district charts. For example, before the pandemic, Los Angeles Unified was reducing its teacher count pretty much in line with its declining enrollment. But with the infusion of federal (and state) funds, Los Angeles kept staffing levels constant despite further enrollment declines. Gwinnett County in Georgia shows a similar bifurcated trend. Its staffing and enrollment lines were moving in tandem until the federal funds drove a rapid increase in hiring.

Two teams of highly regarded researchers found that the federal funds helped boost student achievement, and the staffing gains are surely part of that story. But policymakers should be worried that the elevated hiring levels won鈥檛 be sustainable without new investments.

As a hypothetical, I looked at what might happen if districts were forced to go back to the staffing ratios they had in 2018-19. In that scenario, public schools across the country would need to lay off the equivalent of 156,000 teachers (512,000 staff members overall). Large districts like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Gwinnett County, Dallas and Philadelphia would all need to lay off 10% or more of their teaching staff.  

Cuts of this magnitude are not on the immediate horizon. State investments in public education to grow last year, and many were able to build up their reserve funds or frontload some purchases like textbooks or equipment over the last few years. into those savings allow some districts to temporarily painful cuts.  

But a paper from the looked at district budget expenditures to estimate how many educator jobs were funded solely by federal COVID aid. They found that, in Washington state alone, roughly 8,400 teachers were hired with the federal funds.

Now that that money is gone, thousands of educators' jobs are at risk. Districts will either need to reduce staff counts or find other ways to pay them.

On a per-student basis, that means public school staffing levels once again climbed to new all-time highs.

The NCES numbers are expressed in terms of full-time equivalents (FTEs), which are adjusted based on the number of hours worked by part-time staff. The FTE numbers are the most accurate  measure of total staff time available, but they take time to collect. Separately, the Bureau of Labor Statistics collects raw headcount numbers on the total number of employees in a given industry or sector. Those data come out faster, and the latest numbers that public schools have continued hiring this year.

Despite all the continued attention to supposed , the truth is that schools employ more educators than ever. At the same time that student enrollments fell by 1.3 million (a decline of 2.5%) over the last five years, schools added the equivalent of 55,000 teachers.

As a result, 45 states and the District of Columbia have effectively lowered their student-to-teacher ratio over the last five years. In most places, the changes are small, but 13 states 鈥� Colorado, New York, Michigan, Massachusetts, California, New Mexico, Virginia, Illinois, Mississippi, Indiana, Utah, Oregon and Louisiana 鈥� reduced their ratios by more than one student per teacher. Only Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Alaska and Florida had more students per teachers last year than they did going into the pandemic. (We鈥檙e currently working on updating our map showing the same trends at the district level.)

But it鈥檚 not just teachers: Over the last five years, schools have added 171,000 full-time staff members in a variety of roles. If you walked into a school today, you鈥檇 find more paraprofessionals and administrators. Schools also have more guidance counselors, psychologists and support service staff, which NCES defines as employees 鈥渨ho nurture, but do not instruct students鈥� and includes 鈥渁ttendance officers; staff providing health, speech pathology, audiology or social services; and supervisors of the preceding staff; coaches, athletic advisers and athletic trainers.鈥�

Only three categories of school employees 鈥� administrative support staff, librarians and media support staff 鈥� did not see an increase over this five-year time period. The largest of these is administrative support staff, people whose primary responsibilities are to assist principals or department chairs. The number of librarians and media support staff also fell, part of a over the last few decades as fewer schools employ fewer full-time people in their libraries.

This may feel like d茅j脿 vu all over again to readers who have followed these trends closely since the pandemic. But with districts using the last of their COVID relief funds late last year, it will soon become clear whether they can sustain the investments they鈥檝e been making. There鈥檚 no sign of the peak yet, but the fiscal cliff is getting closer.