The number of homeschooled students in Missouri has nearly doubled since the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, according to a recent study from St. Louis University’s Prime Center.
Roughly 61,000 school-age children are homeschooled, or about 6% of all students across the state. About 3% of students were homeschooled before the pandemic in 2020.
The study helps explain why, in part, enrollment in public schools has dipped across the state, said Colin Hitt, executive director of the Prime Center and a co-author of the study.
“To put this number into perspective, 61,000 students is equal to the total number of public school students in St Louis and Kansas City combined,” Hitt said. “One might think that this was a temporary bounce during and after the pandemic, but we're not seeing that at all and right now, this looks like a huge shift, and all signs are that it's permanent.”
According to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, there are over 1 million school-age children in the state. Roughly 879,000 students are enrolled in public schools. Since the state does not require families to report when their children are homeschooled or when they attend private schools, the study pulled both state and national student enrollment data to inform their findings.
Hitt said the pandemic has led to a surge of families choosing to homeschool their children as opposed to sending them to brick-and-mortar schools.
“A number of families experienced homeschooling for the first time during the pandemic, and it really changed the art of the possible,” Hitt said. “They realized that this is something that they could do and maybe something that they liked, and a number of them stuck with it.”
He also said that the stigma around homeschooling has decreased over the years, and more companies allowing their employees to work from home has led some families to choose alternative methods of schooling.
