The School Districts With the Most Schools

The Puerto Rico Department of Education runs 856 schools, more than any other public school system in the United States, according to an allk12 analysis of National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data for the 2024-25 school year. Los Angeles Unified is second at 778 schools, and Chicago Public Schools is third at 622.

The 20 systems on this list run anywhere from 197 schools to 856, so the district at the top operates more than four times as many buildings as the ones at the bottom.

Enrollment doesn't follow the same order. Puerto Rico teaches 236,079 students, which is only sixth-largest among these 20 districts, and it still runs 78 more schools than Los Angeles Unified does.

Three systems clear 600 schools, then Miami-Dade sits at 521 and Clark County at 373, and after that the list tightens right up. Only 22 schools separate 13th place from 20th, so a district in that stretch could move several spots by opening or closing a handful of elementary schools.

The 20 districts with the most schools

Each district links to its allk12 profile, where you can see the individual schools, enrollment and test results. The sortable version of this ranking, with every district in the country, sits on our districts with the most schools report.

Counting buildings vs counting students

This is a ranking by school count, which makes it a different list from the largest school districts in America by enrollment. School count tells you how a system is organized. Enrollment tells you how many children it serves, and the two measures disagree at almost every position in the top 20.

Puerto Rico is the cleanest example. It operates 78 more schools than Los Angeles Unified while teaching roughly 166,000 fewer students, which happens because its schools are small and spread across an island where a lot of communities are served by a building of a few hundred kids.

Denver and Wake County show the same thing at the other end of the list. Both report 197 schools, and Wake County enrolls 163,037 students while Denver enrolls 89,860, so Denver runs nearly as many buildings as Wake County with barely half the students in them.

That matters if you're using either number to compare districts. A parent reading "197 schools" learns something about how many places a district has to staff, heat, bus to and hire principals for. It says nothing about how crowded any one of those schools is.

Building count drives a particular set of costs as every school needs a principal, a front office, a custodial crew, a kitchen and a place on somebody's bus route, and none of that shrinks much when the building only holds 250 kids. School count is the number that shows up in closure and consolidation fights, while enrollment is the number that drives state funding formulas, so a district can be losing money and still be adding buildings.

Average school size

Puerto Rico averages about 276 students per school, Denver about 456, Los Angeles Unified about 517, and Fairfax County about 901. Fairfax runs the same number of buildings as Prince George's County next door, but its average school holds more than three times what Puerto Rico's does.

The rest of the list falls in between. Philadelphia averages about 527, Chicago about 522, Memphis-Shelby about 532, and Houston about 618. The Florida and Nevada districts cluster near the top: Clark County averages about 797, Palm Beach about 828, and Broward about 752.

Small average size usually comes from geography or grade structure. Districts covering a lot of ground, or splitting elementary grades across many neighborhood buildings, need more schools per thousand students than a district that consolidates into big regional ones.

The Texas districts land in the middle. Houston ISD averages about 618 students across its 272 schools and Dallas ISD about 590 across 238, both well under the Florida county systems and well above Puerto Rico. Montgomery County in Maryland averages about 765 students per school, which is within a student or two of Orange County in Florida, even though one is a suburban Washington district and the other covers metro Orlando.

How we counted these schools

The count excludes virtual and online schools, so what's left is buildings students physically attend. Districts that run large cyber programs look smaller here than they do in their own press releases, and that's on purpose, since a fully online school doesn't add a site to a district's footprint.

Figures are for SY 2024-25, the most recent year with complete federal data, and they shift every year. Districts open, close and merge buildings constantly, so a district at 197 schools this year can easily report 203 or 191 next fall.

Each school is counted under the district identifier it reports to NCES. Charter schools that report as their own local education agency get counted under that agency, not under the district whose boundaries they sit inside, which holds down the totals in places where charters are organized independently.

School counts also include every grade configuration a district reports, from standalone prekindergarten centers up through adult and alternative programs, as long as students attend in person. There's no minimum enrollment, so a 40-student rural school and a 3,000-student high school each count as one.

Why New York City isn't here

New York City is missing because of how federal data handles it. NCES reports the city as 32 geographic community school districts, each with its own identifier and its own school count, so no single record in the data covers the whole system.

Counted as one district, New York City would lead this ranking by a wide margin. Any list built straight from federal district records will leave it out, including this one, and that's worth knowing before you cite a "most schools" ranking anywhere.

Puerto Rico and Hawaii are single statewide systems

Puerto Rico is a US territory, not a state, and its Department of Education operates every public school on the island as one district. It tops the list on school count while ranking sixth on enrollment among these 20 districts, behind Los Angeles Unified, Miami-Dade, Chicago, Clark County and Broward County.

Hawaii works the same way at number eight, with all 296 of its public schools under the state Department of Education. Neither system has local districts underneath it, so the comparison to a county or city district is loose at best. Puerto Rico and Hawaii report as one unit what other states break into dozens or hundreds.

Why Florida has six districts on the list

Miami-Dade, Broward, Hillsborough, Orange, Palm Beach and Duval all make the top 20, which is more than any other state. Florida organizes its public schools by county, so each of its 67 districts covers a whole county including its cities, suburbs and rural areas.

Maryland shows up twice for the same reason, with Montgomery County and Prince George's County both at around 200 schools. Virginia's Fairfax County and North Carolina's Wake County are also county-wide systems. States that draw district lines around individual towns instead, like Pennsylvania outside Philadelphia or most of the Northeast, end up with hundreds of small districts and none of them large enough to appear on a list like this.

Sources
allk12 analysis of National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) enrollment data, SY 2024-25.
NCES: Common Core of Data