It was an evening in April, and I sat down to look at the Knox County Schools budget for the first time. The question that now racks my brain nearly every day popped up just two weeks into my new gig: Where are the kids going?
KCS enrollment was projected to decline by 900 students for this school year, so I continued to look into it through the summer. I found the answer isn't simple. But the cause that emerged as a frontrunner was that a good number of students were leaving public school to be homeschooled.
Knox Countyrecorded an 111% increase in students switching to homeschooling during the COVID-19 pandemic, my past reporting found. In the 2020-21 school year, 5.4% of families in the United States reported homeschooling their children, according
to the Household Pulse Survey, up from 2.8% in 2019.
It makes sense that nearly 1,800 children in Knox County were homeschooled then, back when vaccines weren't available, compared to only 829 were the year before.
But in the years since – more than six years after the pandemic started – more than 1,000 children have consistently been homeschooled in Knox County.
I wanted to dig deeper. Where are homeschooled kids coming from? Is this a shift in one area of Knox County, or is this a widespread change?
The answer, it turns out, is quite complicated. And we'll probably never get an accurate count.
More than 6,700 records we secured from Knox County Schools reveal a complex picture of the homeschool landscape. Several communities emerged as leaders in homeschool withdrawals
Two hundred and seven Halls Middle School students have switched to homeschooling since 2020-21, according to the records I analyzed. That's the most out of any school in KCS. One hundred and ninety-three students have left South-Doyle Middle School for homeschooling in that that period, and 180 students have left Farragut Intermediate School.
Here are all the schools with more than 100 students who left to try homeschooling over the course of the Past six years:
- Halls Middle: 207
- South-Doyle Middle: 193
- Farragut Intermediate: 180
- Hardin Valley Elementary: 163
- Farragut Middle: 153
- Powell Elementary: 135
- Hardin Valley Middle: 134
- West Valley Middle: 133
- Powell Middle: 125
- Northshore Elementary: 122
- Cedar Bluff Elementary: 118
- Karns Middle: 116
- Ritta Elementary: 105
- A.L. Lotts Elementary: 103
But other data leaves me with more questions, and KCS records don't reveal everything.
Most students left during the pandemic (like Farragut Intermediate with 61 withdrawals in 2020-21), but some had large departures during the past school year and even since June.
And what I found in my analysis was that 25%, or 1,720, of these records do not include a reason a student left. Some schools maintained accurate recordkeeping while several did not record why a student left in the past six years.
For example, 95% of the forms families filled out when their students left New Hopewell Elementary School did not list a reason, and there are no recorded homeschool withdrawals since 2020 from the school. Gibbs Elementary recorded nine homeschool withdrawals (all of which were in the 2026-27 school year so far), and 93% of its total records were left blank.
In contrast, every record from Halls Middle School had a reason attached to the withdrawal, while just 3% of records from South-Doyle Middle were blank.
"The 'reason' field is an optional notes field that schools may use to document additional information about a student’s withdrawal," KCS spokesperson Carly Harrington explained to me. "It is limited to 10 characters and is not a mandatory field."
So that means we'll likely never fully know which school is losing the most students to homeschooling, unless KCS makes reporting the reason mandatory for schools.
Homeschool withdrawals accounted for 54% of the records reviewed by Knox News, followed by families choosing a virtual school at nearly 10%. But 26% percent of the withdrawals did not explain where the student went.
There also are hundreds of homeschooled children who have never entered the public school system, so we can't track which zoned school they would've attended had they chosen KCS.
Another wrinkle in the data is the number of students who have returned to KCS after homeschooling. Researchers told me it's common for children to enter and leave public school over the years.
"It should also be noted that many students who withdraw from KCS later return to the district, and some of those students may subsequently withdraw again at a later date. Without individually cross-referencing every student, it is impossible to eliminate occurrences of withdraw, reentry and subsequent repeat-withdraws from the data set," Harrington explained.
I'm always digging deeper. That's one of my charges in my role covering schools and children's issues here in Knox County.
Caitlyn Meisner is the K-12 education reporter for Knox News. Email tips and story ideas to caitlyn.meisner@knoxnews.com.
This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: It's hard to track Knox County's homeschool numbers. Here's what I found | Opinion
