Every October, Massachusetts school districts submit an enrollment count to the state. It’s a routine bureaucratic exercise that quietly determines how much funding a district will receive for the coming year. This year, that count told a story far from routine.
Between October 2024 and October 2025, Massachusetts public schools lost roughly 14,600 students statewide — the lowest total enrollment the Commonwealth has recorded in three decades. Nearly half of that decline, about 46 percent, came from a single group: English learners.
A Decline Concentrated in Gateway Cities
The losses were not spread evenly across the state. They were concentrated in Gateway Cities — the mid-sized, lower-income municipalities defined in state law that have long served as entry points for immigrant families building new lives in Massachusetts.
Chelsea, Everett, Revere, Leominster, and Methuen saw some of the steepest drops. In Chelsea, enrollment fell by roughly 350 students, about 5 percent of the district, with 242 of those students identified as multilingual learners. Superintendent Almi Guajardo Abeyta described families “self-deporting” — a pattern the district had never experienced before. Some families left the country; others relocated to states where they believed immigration enforcement was less visible.
Lynn Public Schools lost more than 600 students between January 2025 and January 2026, with the steepest losses concentrated in the secondary grades. Framingham officials learned that roughly 700 students, out of a district of about 10,000, had left. Of the 26 Gateway Cities statewide, English learner enrollment declined in 22 — and in 14 of them, the drop exceeded 5 percent.
Why English Learner Enrollment Is the Clearest Signal
Massachusetts schools don’t collect data on a student’s immigration status, so researchers and district leaders have turned to English learner enrollment as the closest available proxy for tracking effects on immigrant communities. It’s an imperfect proxy — plenty of English learners are U.S.-born, and plenty of immigrant students are already English proficient — but it’s the best lens available in public data.
And the pattern researchers are seeing lines up with what districts are reporting directly. A May 2026 report from the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center found that stepped-up federal immigration enforcement is a plausible driver of the decline, citing research linking enforcement activity to increased school absences and higher rates of emotional distress among children in immigrant families. Vatsady Sivongxay, executive director of the Massachusetts Education Justice Alliance, told state lawmakers this spring that families are keeping children home from school specifically to avoid encountering enforcement activity.
Superintendents across the affected districts describe a similar picture, even without being able to confirm immigration status directly: families reporting fear, anxiety, and instability, and a corresponding drop in school participation.
The Fiscal Squeeze
This isn’t only a story about students disappearing from classrooms. It’s also a story about school budgets.
Under the state’s Chapter 70 funding formula, districts receive additional aid for English learner students, who require extra resources to support language acquisition and academic achievement. When those students leave, that funding leaves with them — and while Chapter 70 includes a hold-harmless provision guaranteeing a minimum per-pupil increase, it doesn’t come close to offsetting the loss of higher-need students who generated more aid in the first place.
For Gateway Cities, which already operate with fewer local resources than the state average, that gap lands hard. District leaders in Chelsea have begun asking state legislators for one-time “soft landing” funding to absorb the unexpected drop. Some advocates have pointed to revenue from the state’s “millionaires tax,” approved by voters in 2022, as a possible bridge. There’s also concern that these enrollment losses are undercutting the goals of the 2019 Student Opportunity Act, which was designed to direct substantial new resources to exactly these low-income communities to close achievement gaps.
The State’s Response
Massachusetts has moved on two fronts simultaneously: shoring up legal protections for English learners, and pushing back on how enforcement activity intersects with schools.
In August 2025, the Legislature passed and Governor Healey signed a supplemental budget provision explicitly designed as a state-level backstop against the rollback of federal guidance for English learners. It codifies protections for English learners with disabilities, requires school interpreters to be trained and fluent in both languages, and explicitly affirms that public education in Massachusetts is a right regardless of a student’s immigration or disability status.
Separately, the state has issued guidance restricting immigration enforcement access to nonpublic areas of schools — classrooms, offices — absent a valid judicial warrant, and has encouraged districts to train staff on how to respond if enforcement officers appear. Governor Healey has also called on federal immigration authorities to provide a full accounting of arrests made in Massachusetts, and the state has opened a portal for the public to report alleged misconduct by federal agents.
Sources: Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center; GBH News; The Boston Globe; CommonWealth Beacon; Massachusetts General Court press releases.