School leaders from local cities with large immigrant populations say fears of stepped-up federal immigration enforcement is driving a drop in student enrollment numbers.
And, they say, that enrollment decline is contributing to a budget crunch that will make it even harder to meet students’ needs.
“As ICE raids continue across the commonwealth, immigrant families are living in fear,” said Vatsady Sivongxay, executive director of the Massachusetts Education Justice Alliance at a briefing for state lawmakers Wednesday. “And our public schools are paying the price. Children are being kept home to avoid enforcement. Enrollment has dropped in dozens of communities across our state.”
Chelsea School Committee member Sarah Neville said enrollment in her district dropped this year by about 350 students, or 5%. She said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents “started flooding the streets of Chelsea” last year and have been seen near the city’s schools.
Framingham parent Meenakshi Verma-Agrawal said her community recently learned that around 700 kids have left the district, which has a population of about 10,000 students. Likewise, Lynn Public Schools lost more than 600 students from January 2025 to January 2026, according to Superintendent Molly Cohen.
Speakers at Wednesday’s event said their districts are staring down budget cuts as their enrollments drop, since state funding for school districts is tied to the number of students. They appealed to lawmakers to step in with a funding fix in the state budget that will be debated this spring to help stabilize their schools.
Kathryn Anderson, president of the Chelsea Teachers Union, said educators in her city have been reaching out to families and setting up safety teams to make sure students feel secure in school. But Chelsea is now facing a potential loss of 70 educators next year, she said.
“All of these efforts to make a safe space fall flat if kids can’t trust that their teachers are going to be there at school next year,” Anderson said.
The budget plan that Gov. Maura Healey filed in January calls for Massachusetts to spend $7.6 billion in aid to local school districts next fiscal year. Advocates and some lawmakers have been calling for the state to take another look at how it finances K-12 education, as districts cut back amid rising costs.
Figures from the state education department show that student enrollment across Massachusetts dropped by about 15,000 this school year, for a little more than 900,000 students across the state’s K-12 schools. It’s the lowest number recorded since the early 1990s, and comes after a few years when enrollment numbers had been ticking back up following a sharp decline during the COVID pandemic.
Cohen, the superintendent in Lynn, said that since schools don’t ask for students’ immigration status, they can’t directly attribute the recent drops to enhanced immigration enforcement.
“But we know what we are seeing,” she said. “We are seeing fear. We are seeing instability. And we are seeing the financial consequences of that instability land squarely on the districts serving our most vulnerable students.”
