In 2020, Karnes City ISDET graduated 94.2% of its students, right at the state average. Five years later, it graduated 41.4%.

The 52.8-point collapse is the largest five-year graduation decline of any district in Texas, traditional or charter. It is not close. The second-largest decline among traditional ISDs is Fort Stockton ISDET at 24.2 points. Karnes City's drop is more than double that.

The descent was not sudden

What makes Karnes City's collapse distinctive is that it was not a one-year anomaly. The rate fell in every single year: 94.2% to 74.8% to 58.6% to 59.2% to 41.4%. Each graduating class did worse than the one before, with the exception of a brief plateau at roughly 59% in 2022 and 2023 before the bottom fell out again.

The early phase of the decline was steep. The 19.4-point drop from the Class of 2020 to the Class of 2021 ranked among the seven largest single-year declines among Texas districts that year. The subsequent 16.2-point drop, followed by the plateau-to-collapse sequence in 2024, suggests the district did not stabilize at any new normal.

Every subgroup fell

The collapse was not limited to a single demographic group. Every subgroup with enough students to report saw catastrophic declines.

Economically disadvantaged students, who represent the majority of the student body, saw their rate drop from 92.6% to 34.2%. At-risk students fell from 91.7% to 35.3%, with a particularly dramatic path: 91.7% in 2020, a brief spike to 94.7% in 2021, then a plunge through 76.9%, 51.0%, and finally 35.3%.

White students went from 100% to 39.4%. Hispanic students fell from 91.2% to 50.0%. The universality of the decline across subgroups suggests a systemic cause rather than a shift in any single population.

Eagle Ford and the detention center

Karnes City sits in the heart of the Eagle Ford Shale, one of the most productive oil regions in the United States. The town's economy and population are heavily dependent on the energy industry cycle. When oil prices surge, workers arrive with families. When they fall, families leave.

The town is also home to the Karnes County Residential Center, a federal immigration detention facility operated by GEO Group. The facility has been a source of population volatility and community tension for years, and its presence shapes the demographics of the school district in ways that are difficult to capture in enrollment data.

Small districts like Karnes City, where graduating classes may number in the dozens rather than the hundreds, are vulnerable to extreme rate swings from a handful of students. A class of 40 where 5 additional students fail to graduate can move the rate by 12 or more percentage points. But Karnes City's decline is too large, too sustained, and too universal across subgroups to be explained by small-sample volatility alone.

The sharpest falls in Texas

Among traditional ISDs, Karnes City's decline stands alone in both magnitude and trajectory.

Fort Stockton ISD, another oil-region district in the Permian Basin, dropped 24.2 points to 67.6%. Austwell-Tivoli ISD fell 23.1 points to 76.9%. Evant ISD lost 23.0 points to 71.4%. But none of these districts ended below 60%, and none showed the relentless year-over-year pattern that Karnes City did.

At 41.4%, Karnes City's graduation rate is lower than all but a handful of dropout recovery charter schools. It is the lowest graduation rate among the state's 960 traditional ISDs by a wide margin.

Whether the Class of 2025 marks a sixth consecutive year of falling graduation rates will be the next data point worth watching.

Karnes City ISD did not respond to a request for comment.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.