Boards versus students, by locale
13,019 regular school districts, 45.3 million students. NCES Common Core of Data, 2023-24.
Where the boards are
57%
of school boards are rural. They govern 17% of students. The median rural district enrolls 545 students.
Where the students are
65
districts. The largest in the country, and between them they hold 7.8 million students: more than all 7,452 rural boards put together.
The split
Every public school district in the United States answers to a school board. The board adopts the budget, hires the superintendent, and sets the rules. On paper the job is the same in every one of the 13,019 districts counted here. In practice it is two very different jobs, and they are sorted by geography.
Most of the boards are rural. 7,452 of them, 57% of the national total, and they govern 7.8 million students, 17% of the country. The median rural district enrolls 545 students. 5,357 rural boards, nearly three in four, govern fewer than 1,000. 2,763 of them sit in what the federal government classifies as remote rural territory, more than 25 miles from the nearest urbanized area, and those boards average 512 students apiece.
Most of the students are urban. 800 city boards, 6% of the total, govern 13.4 million students, 30% of the country. The median city district enrolls 9,365 students, 17 times the rural median. Add the suburbs and 3,679 boards, roughly one in four, govern 72% of American students. Towns sit between the two: 15% of boards, 11% of students.
The sharpest way to see it is to start at the top of the list. Los Angeles, Miami-Dade, Chicago, Clark County (Las Vegas), Broward County: the five largest districts in the country enroll 1.6 million students between them. Keep counting down. By the 65th district, Granite School District in Utah, the running total passes 7.8 million. That is more students than every rural school board in America combined. 65 boardrooms on one side of the ledger. 7,452 on the other.
The concentration does not stop at the city line. Half of all public school students in the country answer to 713 boards, about 5% of the total. The 6,207 boards that govern fewer than 1,000 students, 48% of all boards, govern 6% of students between them. The 875 boards with 10,000 students or more, 7% of all boards, govern 54%.
The split runs along state lines too. North Dakota (92%), Montana (88%), South Dakota (86%), Nebraska (84%) and Oklahoma (84%) have the most rural boardrooms in the country, by share. At the other end sit New Jersey (19%), Rhode Island (22%) and Massachusetts (24%). In the most rural states the rural boards are a supermajority of the boardrooms and still a minority of the students.
Which school board do you mean?
The phrase "school boards" gets used as if it named one thing. It names 13,019 things, and the gap between them is not a matter of degree. A board governing 545 students hires a superintendent who may also run the high school, approves the bus routes, and knows the families on the roll by name. A board governing a few hundred thousand students oversees a budget in the billions, bargains with unions representing tens of thousands of employees, runs a bond program, and seldom meets the people its decisions reach. Both are called the school board. Both have the same powers under state law. Almost nothing else about the work is the same.
That is why the count matters. A national statement about "school boards" is a statement about rural boards, because that is most of them. A national statement about students is a statement about a few thousand suburban and city boards, because that is where the students are. A survey that samples boards at random will mostly hear from districts of a few hundred students. A policy written to reach most students has to clear fewer than a thousand boardrooms. A training, a tool, a reform, or a reporter's story that fits one kind of board will miss the other.
Serving school boards means serving both, and that starts with knowing which is which: how many there are of each kind, how many students each one answers for, what the job looks like at each scale. The numbers on this page are the first cut. The responsibilities, the resources, and the people vary with them, and so should anything built to help.
The table
| Locale | Boards | Share | Students | Share | Median |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CityInside an urbanized area and a principal city | 800 | 6% | 13,443,853 | 30% | 9,365 |
| SuburbInside an urbanized area, outside a principal city | 2,879 | 22% | 19,246,483 | 42% | 3,041 |
| TownInside an urban cluster, up to 35 miles from an urbanized area | 1,888 | 15% | 4,877,821 | 11% | 2,008 |
| RuralCensus-defined rural territory, any distance from a city | 7,452 | 57% | 7,766,395 | 17% | 545 |
| Rural, fringeRural territory within 5 miles of an urbanized area | 1,337 | 10% | 3,109,920 | 7% | |
| Rural, distantRural territory 5 to 25 miles from an urbanized area | 3,352 | 26% | 3,242,619 | 7% | |
| Rural, remoteRural territory more than 25 miles from an urbanized area | 2,763 | 21% | 1,413,856 | 3% | |
| All | 13,019 | 100% | 45,334,552 | 100% |
Median is the enrollment of the middle district in each group. The three indented rows split the rural total.
Method
- Source. The National Center for Education Statistics Common Core of Data, 2023-24 local education agency directory and membership files, as loaded into the School Boar database.
- Universe. Regular local school districts only (CCD agency type 1). That excludes charter agencies, supervisory unions, regional service agencies, and state-run schools. There are 13,184 regular districts on file; 13,019 of them carry a locale code and reported enrollment above zero and are the ones counted here. Vermont is absent: NCES codes every Vermont district as a component of a supervisory union rather than a regular district, so the state contributes no boards to this count.
- How a district gets its locale. NCES assigns each school a locale from the address of its building, then assigns the district the locale where a majority of its students attend school. If no single locale has a majority, the district takes the majority basic type (city, suburb, town, rural) and, failing that, the plurality. A "rural" district can therefore contain a town school, and a large county district coded suburban can contain rural schools. Counts of rural schools or of students attending rural schools, which NCES also publishes, will differ from the district counts here.
- Buckets. The twelve NCES locale codes are collapsed to their four families: city (11, 12, 13), suburb (21, 22, 23), town (31, 32, 33), rural (41, 42, 43). The rural figure and the indented table rows show the three rural codes separately.
- "Board" means district. Each regular district is governed by one board, so a count of districts is a count of boards. Hawaii, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico each run one district and count once; Hawaii and Puerto Rico are both among the 65 largest. The state figure leaves out the single-district jurisdictions and Vermont.
- Arithmetic. Shares are rounded to whole percentages for display. "Median" is the middle district's enrollment within a group. "Average" is students divided by boards. The 65 is the smallest number of districts, taken from the top of the enrollment list, whose combined enrollment reaches the rural total. The concentration curve ranks all 13,019 boards by enrollment and plots the running share of students against the running share of boards.
- What is and is not measured. The description of what a small and a large board each do is drawn from how districts of those sizes are commonly organized, not from this data set. Everything with a number beside it is.
Every figure on this page is computed from the School Boar database, and the queries and counts behind it are available on request.
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