New York City's public school system has shrunk by nearly 187,000 K-12 students since the 2013-14 school year, a 19% decline that is forcing budget officials to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into campuses just to keep them running. The drop has not slowed down, either: the city lost another roughly 22,000 students between the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years alone, and projections point to an even steeper decline ahead.
The 19% figure, which excludes 3K and pre-K programs, comes from a tracking report by the city comptroller's office. City Comptroller Mark Levine has said the shrinking student population raises concerns about affordability, the futures of young families in New York, and the city's own long-term outlook, while also pointing to changing student needs and greater economic hardship that are increasing demand for specialized support. Levine has gone further, calling for the merging of small schools with 200 students or fewer and writing that some consolidation of schools with sharply declining enrollment is necessary.
As reported by Chalkbeat New York, the city is spending nearly $290 million this year through its hold-harmless policy, which shields schools that have lost or are projected to lose enrollment from the budget cuts that would otherwise follow. The policy began as an emergency measure during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Education Department has now spent nearly $1.9 billion on it since 2020. For the coming school year, 723 schools received some hold-harmless funding, including 55 schools that got more than $1 million each, while schools whose projections actually rose retained about $250 million in budget gains, the outlet's analysis found.
Where the Losses Are Hitting Hardest
The enrollment loss largely reflects fewer school-aged children living in New York in the first place, with the city noting it is affected by national declines in birth rates. New York City now has about 81,500 fewer school-aged children attending public, private, religious and charter schools than it did before the pandemic, per the comptroller. Local school districts lost students across the board, with declines sharpest in the Lower East Side, Harlem, Washington Heights, Inwood, central Brooklyn, and parts of the Bronx.
The pattern shows up starkly in the data: enrollment declined most sharply between fifth and sixth grades, and sixth-grade classes are now 15% smaller on average than kindergarten classes, according to the comptroller's report. District-level figures from the Education Department bear this out elsewhere in the city — District 4 saw its K-5 enrollment fall 17% over five years while its grades 6-8 enrollment dropped 25%, according to a district data summary that also shows District 4's total enrollment falling from 11,754 students in 2020-21 to 10,311 this year. Citywide, District 1-32 enrollment dropped about 3% just in 2025-26, part of a roughly 14% decline from the system's 2016-17 peak.
The shifting population has also changed who fills the city's classrooms. The share of Black students in the public school population fell from 26% to 19% over the period examined, while the share of students with disabilities rose from 19% to 24% and the share of students living in shelters or temporary housing climbed from 8% to 14%. The share of English language learners rose and then fell after immigration patterns shifted under President Trump, the data shows.
Small Schools Running Out of Room — and Players
At the extreme end, some small schools have lost so many students that they can no longer field sports teams, illustrating the kind of strain Levine's proposed mergers are meant to address. A separate Chalkbeat report on shared campuses found that I.S. 339 in the Bronx shrank from 315 students in 2020 to just 150 this year, while Murry Bergtraum High School for Business Careers is now the city's smallest traditional high school with roughly 90 students. Citywide, 72 high schools with fewer than 250 students sit on shared campuses, and nearly half of the city's high school buildings are described as underutilized.
Some shared campuses have found workarounds rather than waiting for formal mergers. At the Theodore Roosevelt campus in the Bronx, principals of six co-located schools decided about a decade ago to open advanced courses like calculus and statistics to students from across the campus, the outlet notes. At the Lehman High School campus, principals of six small high schools agreed in 2016 to align their bell schedules so students could take courses at neighboring schools, and the city has since built STEAM centers in Brooklyn and the Bronx to give nearby high schools access to hands-on math and science facilities.
City's Response and the Road Ahead
New York's public school system is projected to lose 153,000 students over the next decade, according to Bloomberg, a trajectory that has pushed city officials to weigh merging school sites as enrollment keeps falling. Final enrollment projections for next school year predict another drop of more than 20,000 students, per Chalkbeat's analysis. Mayor Mamdani has sought to keep young families in New York by expanding free childcare, one piece of a broader effort to stem the outmigration that demographic researchers tie to the enrollment slide.
Homeschooling has grown alongside the shift, rising nearly fourfold over the past decade to reach nearly 13,100 students last school year, though homeschooled children still represent just 1% of the city's total student population. Nicole Brownstein has said that responding to the enrollment crisis requires confronting the problem directly and engaging deeply with communities. As the New York Daily News reported, the scale of the decline — spanning every school district in the city — means the debate over mergers, shared resources and funding fixes is likely to continue well beyond this school year.
