The pandemic-driven shift to remote learning contributed significantly to a dramatic drop in public school enrollment last year, especially among the nation’s youngest learners.

As the nation reopens schools amid upticks in Covid infections, newly collected data from 70,000 schools across 33 states, details how parents, faced with remote schooling for their kindergarten children, opted not to enroll them in public schools.

Six-year-old Katie Coleman was among the students who did not enroll at San Ramon Elementary kindergarten in Marin County last fall. Her mother, Liz Coleman, after much agonizing decided to keep Katie in her in-person pre-school to spare her the agony of remote.

In a normal year, public school enrollment usually goes up slightly. With the pandemic raging in the fall of 2020, public school enrollment dropped 2% with more than a million students who didn’t enroll in school either in person or online. The biggest group — more than 340,000 — were kindergartners, followed by students in grades one through three, data show.

The trend, reported for California this spring by EdSource, unfolded nationwide with at least 10,000 local public schools that lost the enrollment of 20% or more of their kindergartners, a New York Times analysis reveals.

“This enrollment decline is an important leading indicator of the educational impact of the pandemic,” concludes a Stanford University research paper, a key part of a unique collaboration with journalists from Stanford’s Big Local News, The New York Times, EdSource and Colorado News Cooperative.

“We observed that the impact of remote-only schooling in reducing enrollment was particularly large in kindergarten and to a lesser extent in lower elementary school grades and not so dramatic in middle and high school grades,” said Thomas S. Dee, Stanford education professor.

Read the full article about the impact of COVID-19 on early learners by Karen D'Souza and Daniel J. Willis at EdSource.