New York City Public Schools Have Lost 19 Percent of Their Students in a Decade, the Comptroller Reports — and 128,000 More Could Go
A new comptroller's report puts a decade of emptying classrooms into one number: 187,000 K-12 students gone since 2013-14, with the steepest losses as children reach middle school — and the city's own builders projecting the slide to continue.
The empty desks now have an official count. A report released Thursday by the City Comptroller's office finds that enrollment in New York City's public schools fell 19 percent between the 2013-14 and 2025-26 school years — a loss of 187,000 kindergarten-through-12th-grade students, once the newer universal pre-K grades that can mask the decline are set aside. And the city's own School Construction Authority projects the system could lose another 128,000 students by 2034-35.
The losses are not evenly spread. The report finds the sharpest drops at the cusp of middle school, among Black families, and in parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx — the pattern of families who start their children in the city's schools and leave as the children grow older. Since the pandemic, there are roughly 81,500 fewer school-aged children attending public, private, religious and charter schools across the five boroughs altogether, which is why the comptroller frames the slide as a city question and not only a school one.
"Declining school enrollment is not only a challenge for our education system — it raises fundamental questions about affordability, the ability of young families to build a future in New York, and the kind of city we want to be," Comptroller Mark Levine said in a statement accompanying the report. The mayor's office has so far answered the trend with efforts to keep young families in the city, including an expansion of free childcare; the report's figures suggest parents are still leaving as their children age.
The money question follows the enrollment question into every budget season. A policy known as 'hold harmless' — sparing schools that have lost students from the budget cuts their enrollment would normally trigger — cost nearly $290 million this year, more than double what the city funded last year, according to the Chalkbeat analysis cited in coverage of the report. Whether the city keeps paying to hold shrinking schools harmless, and for how long, is the decision this report puts on the table.
