The troubling enrollment losses that school districts reported last year have in many places continued this fall, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt public education across the country, an NPR investigation has found.

We compiled the latest headcount data directly from more than 600 districts in 23 states and Washington, D.C., including statewide data from Massachusetts, Georgia and Alabama. We found that very few districts, especially larger ones, have returned to pre-pandemic numbers. Most are now posting a second straight year of declines. This is particularly true in some of the nation's largest systems:

New York City's school enrollment dropped by about 38,000 students last school year and another 13,000 this year.

In Los Angeles, the student population declined by 17,000 students last school year, and nearly 9,000 this year.

In the Chicago public schools, enrollment dropped by 14,000 last year, and another 10,000 this year.

"When I talk to my colleagues ... across the country, there's a lot of concern right now," says Chicago schools chief Pedro Martinez. "Pre-pandemic, we were already seeing enrollment decline. So it wasn't that we had stability. What happened during COVID, we just saw an increase in the number that didn't come."

In 2019-2020, public school enrollment dropped by 3 percent nationwide, erasing a decade of slow gains. The decline was attributed largely to COVID-related disruptions, and was concentrated in the early grades. Many families simply opted out of remote learning in the non-compulsory grades of pre-K and kindergarten. School leaders hoped this year would bring recovery.

To the contrary.

Our sample is neither comprehensive nor necessarily representative, but it is large enough to suggest some important patterns. This reporting builds on NPR's reporting from 2020, which documented enrollment drops at a similar sample of districts across the country. That finding was substantiated nine months later by the National Center for Education Statistics, including the fact that enrollment losses in public schools were greatest in pre-K and kindergarten.

Read the full article about school enrollment decline by Anya Kamenetz, Cory Turner, and Mansee Khurana at NPR.