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The numbers are in, and the Tucson Unified School District is still losing students.

Now that the dust has settled on the first weeks of school, the district on Thursday had 57,485 students, down about 1,400 students from this time last year, despite early numbers that indicated a slight uptick.

"I think people just got sick of TUSD and all of the negative publicity," said Kim Grimes, a parent of twin fourth-grade boys at Corbett Elementary School, suggesting the district's financial troubles and the threat of school closures were too much for some families.

She hopes those families will be back.

"They'll realize TUSD offers programs that many of those other choices can't, like libraries and music programs and band and sports and yearbook."

There were some notable trends in the data.

The biggest drop in enrollment came in elementary school. With about 28,200 students at that level, that's a drop of nearly 775 pupils.

Middle school fared little better, losing more than 630 students.

High school was the one bright spot, with almost 100 more students than last year.

School-level trends are more difficult to parse.

Naylor Middle School, which has been wrestling with its designation as a failing school, saw a big drop in its student count.

Enrollment was all over the place for the four schools initially on the closure list last year as the district tried to save money. While Corbett and Wrightstown Elementary lost students, Ochoa Elementary remained steady, and Rogers Elementary even saw a slight uptick.

Declining enrollment has plagued TUSD for a decade.

The district peaked in 1997-98 at roughly 63,000 students and has been losing 300 to 500 students every year since. The biggest dip in recent memory came last year, when the district dropped 1,200 students.

Governing Board member Bruce Burke said he was sorry to see such a steep drop.

"We can't just accept it, but we do have to deal with it. We have to be more aggressive as a district in informing the public about the many good programs at our schools that would attract students back."

Burke said the slide means the board is going to have to look more seriously at "right-sizing" the district by examining the number of schools and looking at district boundaries.

The numbers didn't surprise one of his colleagues on the board, Judy Burns.

"I expected a pretty big loss. There was an awful lot of bad blood when people were thinking about placing their children," she said.

Burns said she's hopeful, though, with new Superintendent Elizabeth Celania-Fagen off to a good start.

"It's going to be a long road. We're going to have to build trust with the community, and that can't be done overnight," Burns said. "You can't just say, 'Trust me.' You have to prove it."

The district did try to entice families with an advertising campaign that used billboards, and radio and television spots to inform parents that under new policies, they can switch to any school in the district, provided there's room. It was limited in scope, at only $25,000.

District spokeswoman Chyrl Hill Lander said there's no way to measure whether the drop might have been still bigger without the campaign. "We didn't expect one marketing campaign to turn things around — you need a sustained, year-round marketing campaign to promote your schools," she said, noting that funding has not yet been identified for such a campaign.