Utah district notes drop in public-school enrollment as more parents turn to homeschooling

Special needs for her son with autism spurred Amanda Shumway to begin homeschooling after she had initially sent him to a public-school kindergarten.

“We felt like the lack of support in the school district was overwhelming,” the Utah mom, who lives in Washington County, told the local CBS affiliate.

“It’s hard to trust people with your kids, especially when they’re special needs and can’t really talk and tell you what’s going on at school.”

Shumway is one of hundreds of families choosing to homeschool each year in Washington County School District, which is now estimating about 600 fewer students across its elementary schools in the fall, according to the affiliate.

“District data shows enrollment began experiencing major drops in Washington County in the 2024-2025 school year. Homeschooling withdrawals have exceeded 300 to 400 students each year since 2022 and showed an over 30% increase in withdrawals to homeschooling from 2022 to 2025.”

Although the entire state has seen enrollment decreases since 2022, this hadn’t always been the case for the southern Utah district, which has been ranked the 13th best district statewide.

“My first few years here, we were growing by more than a thousand students a year, which is a whole high school. That’s tremendous,” said Steven Dunham, the district’s communications director. “So that’s a whole different scenario for us to start to see these decreases now.”

The district enrolls more than 35,000 students.

“If you have a huge enrollment drop, then it does come to a position where you may not be able to bring back some of the newer teachers, and we don’t want to be in that situation,” Dunham explained.

‘Every kid is different on different levels’

Class sizes were a major concern for Shumway, who paid for outside care so she could attend school with her son.

“If there’s too many kids and not enough teachers, then how are the kids all learning?” she asked. “Every kid is different on different levels, and I already feel like it’s a lack of individualized education per kid. And so if you have less teachers, a lot of kids are going to get left behind, especially kids with special needs.”

As previously reported by The Lion, special needs families are increasingly turning to options outside public education for their children.

“As valuable as goals of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) are, the law’s enforcement is left largely to parents,” observed John Kristof, senior research analyst at EdChoice. “If a child’s special needs are not being met in their public school, it is up to the parents to ‘make their service preferences known, and seek redress if these requests are not responded to.’”