A school district is the office above the schools — it hires the staff and sets the calendar. Which states have the most districts? Tap them most-to-least.
Tapping assigns 1→4 in order
More people, more districts, right? So… New York! 🐾
2Answer
The real order is…
California — 2,099 districts, about 1.7× as many as Texas. But the real surprise is at the bottom of the list. Hawaii runs all 296 of its public schools as one single district for the whole state — no other state comes close, because the state with the next-fewest, Nevada, still has 20. Florida has more than 4,000 public schools and splits them among just 83 districts, while Montana has fewer than 900 schools and 476 districts. Same country, opposite maps.
📚 BackgroundNobody decided from Washington how many school districts a state should have — each state drew its own map, and the maps are wildly different. Florida's constitution says "Each county shall constitute a school district", so its public schools are grouped county by county. Hawaii went further: the whole state is one district, the only statewide public school district in the country. Elsewhere, especially in thinly settled ranch and prairie country, small towns kept their own separate districts, so a state with few schools can still have hundreds of them. California has the most of all.(NCES, Common Core of Data)
More people, more districts, right? So… New York! 🐾
3Compare
Public school districts (2024-25)
California#12,099 districts
Most: California (2,099 districts); fewest: Hawaii (1 districts).
Note: operating public school districts at the start of the 2024-25 school year, from NCES's Common Core of Data. The survey lists every agency responsible for free public education or education support services, so a few counted here are service agencies rather than the town district you would picture.
NCES Common Core of Data: Summary Table 2, number of operating public school districts by state (school year 2024-25) (2026-08-12) — Official published counts (the committed raw file holds the value per state exactly as published in the table's 'Number of operating districts' column). The survey lists every education agency responsible for providing free public elementary/secondary instruction or education support services, so a few of the agencies counted are service agencies rather than the town district you would picture.
↳ On the NCES CCD Summary Table 2 for 2024-25, find your state's row and read the 'Number of operating districts' column.