MASSACHUSETTS PUBLIC SCHOOLS are entering an era of fewer children and students, but the causes and consequences of that decline look markedly different depending on where a district is located.
In rural western Massachusetts, shrinking enrollment has been a decades-long problem tied to an aging population, fewer births, a weak housing market and a lack of jobs. In low-income cities, enrollment held up for years as immigration brought new students into classrooms — until that flow sharply slowed. In the suburbs, families continue to move in from elsewhere in the state, but not fast enough to replace the students graduating from increasingly smaller classes.
All of those trends are colliding with a school funding system that educators say is failing, and Massachusetts lawmakers and Gov. Maura Healey have agreed to revisit for the first time in more than a decade.
Statewide K-12 enrollment fell to 867,825 students in 2025-26, the lowest level since 1994 and a 6 percent decline from 922,984 a decade earlier, according to data from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Kindergarten enrollment has fallen 7.8 percent over the same period, closely tracking the decline in births.
Doug Howgate, president and CEO of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation and a member of a recently formed state commission to review aid to school districts known as the Foundation Budget Review Commission, said the trend has to do with Massachusetts’s demographics.
“We saw a huge negative shock during the pandemic, and there was an expectation among, in some corners, that the enrollment decline was just a glitch of the pandemic, and that enrollment would simply shoot back up afterwards. And not only has that never happened, but enrollment has continued to decline since then,” Howgate said.
The state’s birth rate has fallen substantially. Massachusetts recorded 72,835 births in 2010 and 66,442 in 2020, an 8.8 percent decline, per Department of Public Health data. Every year since 2016, the entering kindergarten class has been smaller than the graduating senior class.
It’s a nationwide trend, but particularly acute in Massachusetts. Howgate said birth rates are down 20 percent to 25 percent from the 1990s, and Massachusetts is particularly exposed because it has a highly educated, affluent population that tends to marry later and have fewer children.
Susan Strate, senior manager of the Population Estimates Program at the University of Massachusetts Donahue Institute, said the demographic pressure is likely to continue.
“The level of births we’re seeing today might be as good as it gets,” Strate said.
The state could see a temporary bump in births as the large Millennial generation moves through its 30s, she said, but births are likely to fall further as that population ages beyond its peak childbearing years.
That matters well beyond schools.
“Fewer college students and a smaller workforce” are likely to follow, Strate said, while an aging population creates increasing pressure on the workers who remain.
The state’s old-age dependency ratio — the number of elderly people for every 100 working-age adults — rose from 20 in 2010 to 31 in 2020 and is forecast to reach 35 by 2030, she said.
For years, international immigration has helped offset both the declining birth rate and the number of residents leaving Massachusetts for other states, keeping the state’s school enrollment from falling faster.
“As goes international immigration in Massachusetts, so goes the growth in our labor force, and so goes impacts on K-12 school enrollment,” Howgate said.
DESE and the Healey administration declined to discuss the enrollment trends.
One state, different enrollment stories
The statewide numbers obscure major regional differences.
Rural and small-town districts have lost 11.6 percent of their students over the past decade, the largest decline of any community category. But those districts generally are not losing students after they enroll. Their problem is that smaller cohorts are entering school in the first place.
In Boston, the public kindergarten class last school year was equivalent to only about 58 percent of the city’s resident births five years earlier, compared with roughly 100 percent in the suburbs — evidence that many families leave the city before their children reach school age.
The state’s 26 Gateway Cities, defined as midsized urban centers that are historic entry points for immigrants, were nearly flat for a decade as immigration offset falling birth rates. English learner enrollment rose from roughly 47,000 to 70,000 between 2015-16 and 2024-25.
But in 2025-26, English learners accounted for about 61 percent of the Gateway Cities’ enrollment decline.
Chelsea, which has the highest percentage of foreign-born residents of any community in Massachusetts, illustrates what that reversal looks like on the ground.
The district lost about 6 percent of its students in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, where he has sought to crack down on immigration. Because the state’s Chapter 70 formula weighs low-income and English learner students more heavily, losing these students can have an outsized impact on a district’s budget.
The result was about 50 teacher positions cut, according to Sarah Neville, who is on Chelsea’s school committee.
“Chelsea has always had a lot of mobility,” Neville said. “Rents go up, families move. Families decide to move to another place where they have better opportunities.”
But now, she said, fewer students are coming into the district.
“It’s honestly mostly the border being closed. That’s the big difference,” she said.
The sharp decline in these midsized cities was a change from their steady, flat enrollment or slow growth of the past decade. The situation is completely different in rural Massachusetts.
“What we experience here is chronic, debilitating, declining enrollment,” Sen. Jo Comerford of Northampton said.
“There is no more fat to cut,” she said, of districts’ budgets. Hold harmless keeps state aid from falling, but freezes it so it does not keep pace with rising costs like educator health insurance or the high inflation of recent years, so Comerford said they’re still cutting programs.
“Electives have been cut. Afterschool sports have been cut. Arts and culture are cut. Some of the districts I represent don’t have MassCore, which is a basic academic framework,” she said.
Comerford described a region with fewer jobs and economic engines, inadequate housing and infrastructure, and a shrinking population.
That crisis was on display last week when voters rejected a proposed super-regional district involving six towns — Bernardston, Gill, Leyden, Montague, Northfield and Warwick.
It would have spanned about 160 square miles near the Vermont border in Comerford’s district and combined two existing regional districts and a standalone town to create the Great River Regional School District.
Gill-Montague’s enrollment has fallen about 50 percent over the past 25 years.
“It’s one of the biggest decisions these towns have had to make in the last 30 years, if not for the next 30 years,” Gill Select Board member Greg Snedeker said at an April hearing at the State House. “School budgets are our biggest budget line items, and more importantly, our students deserve all the opportunities that they potentially can get with a larger district.”
The regionalization vote highlights a growing tension in Massachusetts: whether communities should be encouraged — or eventually required — to surrender some local control as enrollment falls.
Sen. Jason Lewis, the Senate chair of the Joint Committee on Education and a member of the Foundation Budget Review Commission, said Massachusetts may need larger regional districts in some areas.
He pointed to Maryland, which has a similar student population but only 26 school districts, compared with roughly 320 in Massachusetts.
Lewis said the state should provide technical assistance and grants to help communities pursue consolidation, and potentially consider “top-down requirements or mandates” if local opposition continues to block mergers.
“I recognize that’s very challenging politically, and we have a long tradition in Massachusetts of local control, and I respect that,” Lewis said. “But I guess I come back to the fact that if you have declining enrollment and small districts are getting smaller and smaller, we can’t let the price for that be paid by the students.”
Republican Sen. Peter Durant, another Foundation Budget Review Commission member, offered a different point of view from Lewis, a Democrat: Local decisions should remain local.
“That should be a local issue, and funding them at the proper level lets them make those local decisions instead of having this one size fits all,” he said.
He pointed to West Brookfield, in his district, where a declining population led to the closure of an elementary school and students now travel to another town.
“We need this assistance from the state. The assistance that they’ve promised,” he said. The majority of the towns he represents are in a regional school district, and chose to regionalize in part because the state promised they would fully reimburse transportation costs.
“We never have,” he said.
What happens to the money?
A debate has been brewing for years around Chapter 70, the state’s primary school aid program.
On paper, declining enrollment should mean less state aid. In practice, Massachusetts’ funding formula cushions districts from those losses.
Overall Chapter 70 aid increased to $7.66 billion in fiscal 2027, up 4.03 percent, even as enrollment fell.
No district receives less Chapter 70 aid than it received the previous year, and every district is guaranteed at least its prior-year aid plus $160 per pupil in fiscal 2027. As a result, only 62 districts are receiving aid driven directly by the formula’s enrollment and need calculations; most are receiving hold-harmless funding plus minimum aid.
Lewis said that is itself evidence the formula needs attention.
“The high number of communities in held harmless is actually one of the clear signs that we need to be reviewing our funding formula again,” he said. “The formula is basically broken for many communities.”
Yet there is a fundamental question about what the formula can realistically accomplish.
Howgate said the state cannot simply create a funding formula that pays districts for having fewer students.
“I don’t think we’re going to be able to come up with a formula to give districts money for fewer kids,” he said.
Instead, he said, the state needs to look at other programs that support schools, including rural aid, regional transportation, special education and charter reimbursement.
Lewis said Massachusetts is already doing some of that through “workarounds,” including a separate rural school aid line item and expanded special education transportation reimbursement.
The state recently allocated $16.5 million for rural districts, while another $10 million was included in a supplemental spending bill for schools facing immigration-related enrollment shocks.
Those targeted programs could become increasingly important as lawmakers revisit the formula.
“As your enrollment declines, it just becomes harder and harder to have scaled economies and to be able to offer robust courses,” Lewis said, adding that students miss out on advanced placement classes, extracurricular activities and sports.
Howgate said the state faces a broader public finance question: How should finite resources be distributed when enrollment is growing in some communities and falling in others?
“At the end of the day, when you figure out how to distribute finite resources for public schools, a critical input in that formula is going to be students,” he said.
But that does not mean the problem can be solved simply by cutting aid to declining districts, Lewis said.
Lewis said the funding system should account for “rurality” in much the same way it accounts for low-income students and English learners.
Durant agreed that rural districts need more recognition of their unique costs.
“The last work that was done” on the funding formula in 2015 focused on Gateway Cities and low-income neighborhoods, Durant said. “It’s our turn now.”
The challenge is that neither the funding formula nor regionalization can reverse the underlying demographic trend.
Howgate said Massachusetts has limited ability to change where people live or how many children they have.
“All we can do is try to put in place policies that encourage folks to live, stay in Massachusetts, and raise families in Massachusetts,” he said.
For Massachusetts, the question over the next decade may be less whether enrollment declines than who absorbs the cost, and whether the state can keep a shrinking student population from producing an even larger economic problem.
