-The list of the largest school districts is dominated by three states: Texas, California and Florida. Texas has 41 districts in the top 200 (19 in the top 100). Those 41 districts grew less than 1 percent from 2010 to 2011. Over 25 years, they grew more than 65.8 percent.
-California has 29 in the top 200 (12 in the top 100). One of those, Twin Rivers, did not exist in 1986. The 28 other districts grew 29.7 percent from 1986 to 2011.
-Florida has 24 in the top 200 (13 in the top 100). The 24 districts grew less than 1 percent from 2010 to 2011, but over 25 years, the districts saw student numbers increase more than 70 percent.
-Fourteen states have no school districts among the 200 largest: Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Maine, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming.
-Thirty-one of the 200 largest school districts report lower student enrollments in 2011-12 compared with 1986. The sharpest decline was in Detroit, where enrollment was 65.1 percent lower than it was 25 years earlier. Twenty-two districts experienced enrollment declines over 25 years of 10 percent or more.
-Of the 200 largest school districts in 2011-12, there were 60 that are at least twice as large as they were in 1986; 44 of those 60 were not among the 200 largest districts in 1986-87. Of those fastest-growing 60 districts, 18 are in Texas, nine are in Florida, and seven are in California.
-Taken as a whole, the enrollment in the 200 largest districts accounts for 14.7 percent of the total population in those districts.
-Thirty-three districts have student enrollments that account for more than 20 percent of the district’s overall population—20 of those are in Texas. The United (Texas) district has the highest percentage—26.2 percent.
*Twelve districts have student enrollments that account for less than 10 percent of the overall district population. Two of those are districts that enroll only high school students (Kern Union and Sweetwater Union in California).
*The K-12 district where students make up the smallest percentage of the district population is San Francisco; its 2011-12 enrollment of 56,222 represents only 6.9 percent of the district’s estimated 2011 population of 812,826. In contrast, the Gwinnett County (Ga.) district had about the same population in 2011—813,284—but it has more than 100,000 more students than San Francisco. Gwinnett County’s 2011-12 enrollment of 162,370 makes up 20 percent of the district’s population.
