Correction (October 1, 2026): An earlier version compared North Shore 112's 2025-26 enrollment with earlier years drawn from a different state count. On the Report Card count the district lost 705 students (16.0%) from 2014-15 to 2024-25, while Illinois fell 10.0%; the earlier version said 733 students through 2025-26 against an 11.4% statewide decline. On the state's fall count, used at both ends, the four-year decline since 2021-22 totals 139 students, not 119. The record low, the grade figures and the article's conclusions are unchanged.

Monica Schroeder became superintendent of North Shore School District 112^↗ET on July 1, after the district posted its smallest published enrollment count in 2025-26.

North Shore 112 enrolled 3,667 students last school year, 2025-26, according to the state's fall enrollment count, the only count published for that year. That is the lowest figure anywhere in its published record: below every year of the fall count, which begins in 2020-21, and below every year of the Illinois Report Card count going back to 2014-15, when it enrolled 4,400. On the Report Card count the district fell to 3,695 by 2024-25, a loss of 705 students, about a sixth of its enrollment, over a period in which Illinois as a whole fell 10.0 percent. It declined faster than the state.

The recent movement is all in one direction. On the fall count, after a small uptick in 2021-22, the district fell in each of the four years through 2025-26, giving back 139 students. None of those declines is dramatic on its own. Together they made 2025-26 the low point in the published record.

The explanation the data rules out

A district losing students year after year invites an obvious assumption: that fewer children are arriving at the bottom. In several Illinois districts that is exactly what the grades show.

Not here. North Shore 112 enrolled 400 kindergartners in 2025-26 and 396 eighth graders. That school year's kindergarten class was four students larger than its eighth-grade class.

Across kindergarten through eighth grade the largest and smallest classes are 66 students apart, and the smallest is first grade rather than kindergarten. That is a level spine, not a narrowing one.

This does not explain the decline. It rules out one candidate in the most recent published year. Whatever took about a sixth of North Shore 112's students out of its schools after 2014-15, that year's kindergarten class was not visibly smaller than its eighth-grade class. A superintendent planning staffing across the district is working from a published grade distribution in which classes were much the same size as each other.

The district describes itself on its official overview as operating nine schools.

What the public record shows about the new superintendent

Dr. Monica Schroeder has served as Superintendent of Schools since July 1, 2026. Beyond the appointment itself, the public record available for this article says little about how she reads the enrollment picture, and she did not discuss it with us.

The ILEdTribune contacted Schroeder for comment and did not receive a response by the close of review.

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Enrollment figures come from the Illinois State Board of Education public enrollment record. Changes through 2024-25 use the Report Card count; Illinois did not publish a 2017-18 figure in that series, so that year is absent from the charts and no year-over-year comparison crosses the gap. The 2025-26 figures and every change ending in 2025-26 use the state's Fall Enrollment Report on both ends, and the two counts are never subtracted from each other.

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