Enrollment at Newton Public Schools (NPS) fell to a new decade low for the 2025–26 school year with 11,462 total enrolled students, losing 170 enrolled students from the previous year. 

“There’s a decline that we’re trying to address,” Ward 8 School Committee member Victor Lee said in an interview with The Heights. 

Newton’s overall student enrollment hasn’t dipped below 11,600 since 2005 when it was 11,567, according to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education,

On Jan. 7, at the Newton School Committee’s (NSC) first meeting since the municipal election, Katy Hogue, chief of data and research for NPS, said that last year’s enrollment slipped faster than the city projected. 

“[We saw] a decrease of 1.4 percent from last year,” Hogue said. “This year’s enrollment resulted in a variance from projection of negative 0.5 percent.”

While many surrounding districts in Massachusetts are facing steep unenrollment, largely due to the impact of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, Lee said that it’s not so simple for Newton. 

“There’s a few different factors that I think are going on,” Lee said.

Over the past decade, Newton has lost a total of 1,208 students. Enrollment totals mostly increased until 2020, when the pandemic interrupted the public schools’ progress—many families turned to either private education or homeschooling. 

“We see a significant drop of approximately 1,000 students during the COVID timeframe,” Lee said. “That is a big drop, but it’s been around roughly that same level since the 2021 or 2022 time period. There are slight declines that are still happening.”

The NSC is expecting an overall enrollment decline for the next three years before stabilizing. Lee pointed out that one of the factors contributing to this decrease in enrollment is the number of older Newton residents occupying residential space over families with young children.

“There’s a lot of folks who are older seniors who are aging in place,” Lee said. “And there’s some interesting open questions about, as those generational shifts turn around, are you going to start to see those houses turn over and more younger families come in that will bring things back into play here?”

Birth rate is also an important factor for enrollment numbers. Birth rates affect enrollment rates with an approximate five-year delay, as children typically enter the school system at age 5, according to Hogue. 

“Typically, we have more students enrolling in kindergarten than were born five years prior,” Hogue said. 

For instance, the crude birth rate (births per 1,000 people) was 13 in 2010, according to Macrotrends, which corresponds to NPS’s enrollment of 12,670 students in 2015. Similarly, the crude birth rate declined to 10.90 in 2020, aligning with a reduced NPS enrollment of 11,462 students in 2025. 

Additionally, Lee referenced increased housing costs in Newton as an element impacting enrollment, since incoming families will likely gravitate toward private over public schools. 

“The dynamics of who’s moving into Newton now is starting to evolve a bit, too,” Lee said. “Pricing for houses in Newton has gone up quite a bit. I grew up in Newton. It’s quite different, even from when I first got my house that I’m living in now … And so that also creates interesting questions that we’re sort of exploring, including, let’s say, folks with higher socioeconomic status are moving in and therefore are going to be more open to the possibility of a private school alternative.”

With the recent Newton Teachers Association (NTA) strike, perceived lack of rigor in NPS curriculum, and concerns over overcrowded classrooms, some residents seem unsatisfied with NPS, Lee acknowledged.

“I’m careful, because there’s a part of me that says we want to move on, and there’s a part of me that’s also very cognizant of history, recent history,” Lee said. “To me, there are factions of our community that are groups within our community that have felt and actually believe, too, that some of the academic rigor in core subjects … [have] sort of fallen by the wayside.”

During his campaign for the school committee seat, Lee observed families’ lack of trust in teachers because of the NTA strike.

“That was probably one of the most common things I heard, was people constantly like, ‘I can’t say, I want to speak ill of a teacher—I kind of like my own personal teacher—but that’s really impacted our family,’” Lee said. “And they don’t want to say that very broadly—they’re worried that, in some cases, the school will take it out on their kids.”

While there are other presiding NPS budget concerns as a result of last year’s budgetary conflict between NPS Superintendent Anna Nolin and former Mayor Ruthanne Fuller, Lee said that decreased enrollment could possibly impact the NPS budget when it starts to appear in special education plans.

“So the tricky part is, you have this mismatch that can happen where this is a very steady sort of way of doing revenue, but your cost can fluctuate very dramatically depending on who’s here, who’s returning, what kind of services they need in any given year,” Lee said. “You just don’t know whether that individual coming in is going to be lower cost to serve or higher cost to serve, depending on their individual needs.”

While the adaptation of the state’s school choice program—an alternative for unsuccessful Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO) applicants, a voluntary racial integration initiative for students from Boston and other districts to find another way into Newton schools—remains possible, Lee said the NSC’s longstanding concerns persist.

In 2024, Newton considered adding the program, but chose to retain only METCO.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the topic doesn’t come back up again at some point,” Lee said. “When you’re talking about school choice, some folks in the community at large, I think, would question, like, ‘what is our core focus right now?’ Is it on the people who live and reside in Newton, leaving aside things like METCO for a second, or is it that we are responsible for educating a broader swath of people?”

Newton officials remain optimistic that enrollment will begin to increase in five years after more residential developments are finalized. 

“Students are being added from 18 residential developments over the five years, which results in an addition of 544 students,” Hogue said. 

In the meantime, Lee assured that the new school committee will be hard at work.

“But ultimately, I think we just want to restore good relationships again, with all the parties having a productive working relationship,” Lee said. 

Editor’s note: The NSC and Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) numbers of enrollment are slightly different, as the NSC gathers its data on Oct. 1 and DESE on Jan. 8.