MISSOURI - Homeschooling in Missouri has nearly doubled since the pandemic, and it seems more parents are keeping their children at home for school as these rates have not shifted back to prepandemic levels, according to a new Saint Louis University report.

There are 61,000 school-aged children in Missouri currently homeschooled, which is equal to the number of students enrolled in both the St. Louis and Kansas City public school districts combined, according to the Saint Louis University Prime Center.

The report states that with over 6.% of children now homeschooled, this percentage is nearly double the 3% of students attending school from home pre-pandemic.

Despite Missouri being one of 29 states that does not require homeschooling to be reported, the Saint Louis University Prime Center utilized publicly available data to estimate current statistics of homeschooled students throughout the state.

The study utilized data from the U.S. Census Bureau, CDC live birth numbers, and polling parents in order to find an estimated number of homeschoolers.

There are four reasons parents may be keeping their children at home for schooling, according to Collin Hitt, executive director of the SLU Prime Center.

"One is that during the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of Missouri families experienced homeschool or online learning for the first time, and some decided that it worked for them and they stuck with it," Hitt said.

Additionally, Hitt said homeschool became more logistically feasible after the world of working remotely became more accessible in the modern working world.

As homeschooling continues to become more common, the more families are willing to try keeping their child at home for school.

Lastly, Hitt said after the pandemic some families possibly considered home to be a more stable or predictable environment for learning based on various ever-changing elements in schools like test scores and teacher turnover rates.

"All four of those things are really new over the last five years," Hitt said. "Maybe we shouldn't have ever expected these numbers to bump back up to where they had been pre-pandemic."

In St. Louis alone, Hitt said despite dwindling enrollment in public schools, there isn't an increase in private school enrollment, leading to the reason that there's an increase in homeschooling in the St. Louis region.

According to Hitt, total public school enrollment in St. Louis City and St. Louis County fell by 9,149 students between 2019 and 2023 across Saint Louis Public Schools, charter schools, and St. Louis County districts combined.

Hitt said this implies a 7,605 or 24 percent increase in students attending non-public schools.

"While we can't disentangle private school from homeschool students at the local level, we suspect most or all of this increase is being driven by a jump in homeschooling," Hitt said.