NEW YORK - Over one million US children did not enroll in local schools, with the sharpest drop in kindergarten -- more than 340,000 students, as the COVID-19 pandemic is sweeping the country, the New York Times quoted official data as reporting on Saturday.

The report said that the kids who had been expected to enroll in local schools did not show up, either in person or online, and the missing students were concentrated in the younger grades.

The report added that besides triggering vast disparities in health care and income, the pandemic also "hardened inequities in education, setting back some of the most vulnerable students before they spent even one day in a classroom," according to an analysis of enrollment at 70,000 public schools across 33 US states.

The analysis by the New York Times in conjunction with Stanford University shows that in the 33 states, 10,000 local public schools lost at least 20 percent of their kindergartners. In 2019 and in 2018, only 4,000 or so schools experienced such steep drops.

The survey also showed that the steepest student enrollment drop was in the households below or just above poverty line, adding that the decline was 28 percent larger in schools in those communities than in the rest of the country.