Published on May 9, 2025 at 1:16 pm
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With a brand new pope chosen in the past couple of days, our Number of the Week reflects Floridians’ love for the Catholic Church.
While most states have seen a recent decrease in enrollment at private Catholic K-12 schools, Florida’s numbers are soaring like the wings of angels. Our Number of the Week is Florida’s increase in Catholic school enrollment over the last decade: 12.1%.
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12.1%
That means the state saw an increase at the same time that Catholic schools nationwide saw a decrease of 13.2.%, according to the National Catholic Educational Association. Step Up for Students, Florida’s voucher program vendor, called Florida’s stand-out love of Catholic schools “an especially amazing trend line” in a recent email to scholarship recipients’ parents.
In recent years, Florida has remade itself as a model state for expanded school choice — from increasing funding for charter schools to establishing “universal” vouchers that parents can use toward paying for private school.
As Florida’s population has increased, private school enrollment has grown too.
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The vast majority of Florida’s K-12 students — about 85% — still go to public school (a bit below the national average of 88% nationwide, according to the most recent U.S. Census data). Even before Florida enacted private school vouchers for all, starting in the 2023-24 school year, enrollment in private schools was already trending upward.
In the Jacksonville area in 2023 (the most recent year for which data are available), private schools were most popular in Baker County, where only 81% of students attend public school. A decade prior, 92.3% of the county’s students attended public school.
Locally, private schools were least popular in St. Johns County — the only local county with a decrease in private school enrollment, from 14.2% down to 10.7% of K-12 students over that decade.
In Duval County, 82.3% attended public schools, down from 84.1% 10 years earlier.
