District 9 - EdTribune NY - New York Education Data

Only 14% of New York Districts Have Recovered From COVID

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction (April 12, 2026): An earlier version of this article understated NYC District 75's share of statewide enrollment as less than 0.2%; the correct figure is about 1.2%. It also overstated the 2024 enrollment decline outside New York City as 5,519; the correct figure is 3,106.

Part of the New York Enrollment 2026 series.

Five years after COVID emptied New York's classrooms, the students have not come back. Of 722 districts that can be tracked from 2019 to 2026, just 101, or 14.0%, have returned to their pre-pandemic enrollment. The other 621 districts are still underwater, collectively missing 263,494 students. Nearly nine in ten New York public school students, 89.7%, attend a district that has fewer children than it did before the pandemic.

That 14% figure is not an artifact of small-district churn. Only one of New York's 41 districts with 10,000 or more students has recovered. Among the 67 mid-size districts (5,000 to 9,999), just seven have matched their 2019 levels. The non-recovery is most severe where the most students live.

The recovery that never arrived

The first year of data after 2019 suggested the losses might be temporary. In 2020, 43.3% of districts still matched or exceeded their 2019 totals, reflecting that COVID's initial impact was concentrated in certain regions. Then the bottom fell out. By 2021, the recovery rate dropped to 28.4%. By 2022, it was 14.5%.

A brief plateau followed: 16.8% in 2023 and 17.3% in 2024, the year a migrant-enrollment surge in New York City temporarily slowed the statewide decline. The state added 5,669 students that year, the only growth since 2010. The plateau broke in 2025 (16.0%) and collapsed further to 14.0% in 2026.

Statewide, enrollment fell from 2,653,358 in 2019 to 2,447,074 in 2026, a loss of 206,284 students (-7.8%). The 2025-2026 single-year drop of 37,176 students (-1.5%) is the largest outside the pandemic itself.

Fourteen of the 15 worst losses are in New York City

The Bronx alone accounts for four of the five deepest non-recoveries. NYC Geographic District #10^↗ lost 12,129 students since 2019, a 23.5% decline. District #24 in Queens^↗ lost 10,582 (-18.9%). District #9 in the Bronx^↗ lost 9,270 (-28.7%). District #2 in Manhattan^↗ lost 8,332 (-13.6%).

District	2019	2026	Change	Pct.
NYC Dist. #10 (Bronx)	51,648	39,519	-12,129	-23.5%
NYC Dist. #24 (Queens)	56,098	45,516	-10,582	-18.9%
NYC Dist. #9 (Bronx)	32,299	23,029	-9,270	-28.7%
NYC Dist. #2 (Manhattan)	61,267	52,935	-8,332	-13.6%
NYC Dist. #11 (Bronx)	37,026	29,885	-7,141	-19.3%
NYC Dist. #20 (Brooklyn)	49,743	43,051	-6,692	-13.5%
NYC Dist. #15 (Brooklyn)	31,262	25,249	-6,013	-19.2%
Rochester	26,947	21,216	-5,731	-21.3%

Rochester^↗ is the lone upstate entry in the top eight, losing 5,731 students (-21.3%). Outside the city, Hempstead^↗ on Long Island lost 2,608 students (-35.9%), the steepest percentage decline among districts with over 1,000 students.

Overall, NYC's 52 geographic and special districts posted a 25.0% recovery rate, with 13 of 52 recovering. Outside the city, 88 of 670 districts (13.1%) recovered. NYC's higher recovery rate reflects the migrant-enrollment boost that temporarily lifted some districts above their 2019 baselines before reversing in 2025-2026.

Size and vulnerability

The pandemic inverted the usual relationship between district size and stability. The smallest districts, those with fewer than 100 students in 2019, posted the highest recovery rate: 41.2% (7 of 17). Many are charter schools that opened seats or expanded grade bands after 2019. Districts with 100 to 499 students recovered at 20.0%.

At the other end, districts with 10,000 or more students recovered at just 2.4%, or one of 41. That single district, NYC District 75, enrolled 29,975 students in 2026, about 1.2% of the state's total. The structural pattern: the larger the district, the worse the non-recovery.

This size gradient means the non-recovery concentrates where students actually are. Districts that have not recovered enrolled 2,017,495 students in 2026. Recovered districts enrolled just 232,443.

The migrant boom and its reversal

The 2024 enrollment uptick, the only growth year since 2010, was driven almost entirely by migrant enrollment in New York City. Between spring 2022 and December 2024, the city received 225,700 asylum seekers, and over 36,000 students in temporary housing enrolled in NYC public schools.

That surge masked what was happening everywhere else. Even in the "growth" year of 2024, charter schools gained 5,938 students while traditional public schools lost 269. Outside NYC, enrollment fell by 3,106 students.

The reversal came fast. Chalkbeat reported that at 60 schools that absorbed the most migrant students, enrollment fell 11% in a single year, wiping away years of gains. ATLAS, a Queens school that peaked at 1,428 students during the migrant influx, dropped to 829, a 42% decline over two years.

"That means major cuts to federal funding and difficult decisions for the entire system." — Loredana Valtierra, Century Foundation fellow, Chalkbeat, Nov. 2025

The city's response to the enrollment drop has been fiscal, not programmatic. NYC chose not to claw back $250 million in midyear budget reductions from schools that fell below projected enrollment, holding nearly two-thirds of the city's roughly 1,600 schools harmless despite having fewer students than expected.

Where the missing students went

The pandemic accelerated an exit from New York's traditional public school system that has not reversed. Between 2019 and 2026, charter school enrollment grew from 147,428 to 190,105, a gain of 42,677 students (+28.9%). Traditional public schools lost 248,961 students (-9.9%) over the same period.

Homeschooling has also grown sharply. The Empire Center documented that homeschool enrollment jumped 178% over the past decade, the second-highest growth rate in the nation after Washington, D.C. In New York City alone, homeschooling tripled in 24 of 33 school districts since 2017-2018, reaching 53,967 students statewide.

But these alternative enrollments do not fully explain the gap. Charter enrollment alone grew by 42,677 since 2019, and homeschool enrollment has surged, but together they do not account for a 206,284-student loss from public school rolls. Birth rate decline explains much of the remainder: New York State's fertility rate has tracked below the national average since before the pandemic, and kindergarten enrollment, the closest proxy for incoming cohort size, has fallen from 188,203 in 2019 to 163,820 in 2026, a 13.0% decline. Net domestic outmigration, a persistent feature of New York's demographics since at least 2020, compounds the picture.

A funding formula that doesn't see the loss

New York's Foundation Aid formula distributes $35.9 billion annually to public school districts. A "hold harmless" provision prevents any district's allocation from declining year-to-year, regardless of enrollment. In fiscal year 2025, half of all districts, 334 of 668, would have faced Foundation Aid reductions without this protection.

The Rockefeller Institute recommended phasing out the provision in its 300-page review of the formula. Governor Hochul's office rejected the idea, stating the governor "believes we should avoid proposals that would negatively impact school budgets." The formula continues to rely on data from the 2000 Census for poverty calculations, though a 2025 budget change replaced this with a three-year rolling average called SAIPE.

The policy question is whether hold harmless, designed as a temporary cushion, has become a permanent subsidy for districts whose enrollment may never return.

The trajectory gap

Projecting New York's 2015-2019 decline rate forward, enrollment in 2026 would have been approximately 2,581,727. The actual figure of 2,447,074 leaves a gap of 134,653 students, the excess loss attributable to the pandemic and its aftermath beyond what the pre-existing decline trajectory predicted.

That 134,653-student gap is not recoverable through normal demographic patterns. Kindergarten cohorts are shrinking, the migrant enrollment boost has reversed, and homeschool growth shows no sign of slowing. The 2027 kindergarten class, born during the pandemic's lowest birth year, will enter a system already 206,284 students below its 2019 level. For 621 districts still underwater, the question is no longer when recovery arrives. It is how schools designed for classrooms of 25 operate with classrooms of 18, how districts built for growth manage sustained contraction, and whether a funding formula that holds everyone harmless can survive a generation of decline.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Three Bronx Districts Lost 39,000 Students in 14 Years

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Part of the New York Enrollment 2026 series.

District 8^↗ has lost students every year since 2013. Not most years. Every year. Fourteen consecutive annual declines, without a single year of growth. District 10^↗ and District 9^↗ are on 10-year losing streaks of their own. Together, these three Bronx geographic districts enrolled 126,590 students in 2012. By 2026, that number had fallen to 87,562, a loss of 39,028 students, or 30.8% of their combined enrollment.

That is structural contraction. In Morrisania, Fordham, Norwood, and Throgs Neck, schools cannot operate the same way they did a decade ago. All three districts hit all-time lows in 2025-26.

The scale of it

District 10, the largest of the three, stretches from Fordham through Norwood and into parts of Riverdale. It fell from 58,576 students in 2012 to 41,251 in 2026, a loss of 17,325 students (29.6%). District 9, covering Morrisania and Tremont in the South Bronx, fell from 36,321 to 24,040, losing 12,281 students (33.8%). District 8, which includes Throgs Neck and parts of Pelham Bay, fell from 31,693 to 22,271, a loss of 9,422 (29.7%).

District 9's trajectory is the steepest on a percentage basis. It actually grew through 2016, peaking at 37,536. Its decline from peak to present is 35.9%. District 10, by contrast, never had a recovery year after 2016. District 8 has been shrinking since 2013 without interruption.

These three districts account for 65.4% of the total enrollment loss across all six Bronx geographic districts. The borough as a whole fell from 208,789 to 149,117 students over the same period, a 28.6% decline.

Acceleration, not stabilization

The loss is getting worse, not better. Between 2012 and 2017, the three districts combined lost an average of about 975 students per year. Between 2017 and 2020, that accelerated to roughly 2,448 per year. Since 2020, the average annual loss has been 4,468.

The pandemic years of 2021 and 2022 were catastrophic: combined losses of 8,156 and 6,367 respectively. But the 2026 loss of 4,755 is the largest in any non-pandemic year, suggesting the underlying decline is still accelerating even after the acute COVID shock faded. Only two of the 14 years since 2012 saw any combined gain (2015 and 2016, both modest), and neither interrupted the district-level streaks for Districts 8 or 10.

The post-COVID era has been worse than the pre-COVID era for all three. District 10 lost 4,947 students across the entire eight years from 2012 to 2020. It then lost 12,378 in just the six years since, two and a half times as many in three-quarters of the time. District 9 lost 3,067 pre-COVID and 9,214 after. District 8 lost 4,204 and then 5,218.

The kindergarten signal

Kindergarten enrollment is where the future announces itself. Across the three districts, K enrollment fell from 9,727 in 2012 to 5,293 in 2026, a 45.6% decline. That is nearly double the rate of total enrollment loss, and it means the pipeline feeding these districts' elementary schools has been cut nearly in half.

In 2012, these districts enrolled 137 kindergartners for every 100 twelfth-graders. In 2026, that ratio has flipped: 84 kindergartners for every 100 seniors. The grade pipeline has inverted. High school enrollment, built on cohorts that entered kindergarten a decade ago, now exceeds the incoming elementary cohorts that will define these districts' size for the next 13 years.

What is driving the contraction

No single force explains a 30.8% decline across three districts in 14 years. Several overlapping pressures are at work.

Charter school growth has drawn families out of district schools. The Empire Center for Public Policy documented that the Bronx saw the largest enrollment drop among NYC boroughs over the five years from 2019-20, losing more than a fifth of its students from 174,830 to 139,305. Statewide, charter enrollment grew 2.9% to 186,458 students in 2024-25 even as district enrollment continued to fall. In the Bronx, where district and charter schools serve overlapping populations in some of the city's poorest neighborhoods, each charter seat gained is likely a district seat lost.

Housing displacement is a second pressure. A Bronx Times analysis found that eight of the Bronx's 12 community districts rank in the top 10 citywide for affordable housing threats. The areas overlapping Districts 9 and 10, including Fordham, Belmont, and Kingsbridge, have threat scores exceeding 20, higher than any non-Bronx district. Prior to the pandemic, the Bronx had the highest concentration of rent-burdened households in the city, with 56% paying more than 30% of income toward rent.

"We need to define what it means to be affordable in respect to people and their wages." -- Julie Colon, Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition, via Bronx Times (May 2023)

Declining birth rates provide a third explanation. Empire Center research notes that the combination of declining fertility, net domestic outmigration, and reduced lawful immigration pushed New York's school-age population from nearly 3.5 million in 2000 to around 3 million. The kindergarten collapse in these districts, with K enrollment down 45.6%, is consistent with sharply smaller incoming cohorts, not just families choosing other schools.

The broader Bronx picture

Every Bronx geographic district lost enrollment over this period. District 12 (Williamsbridge, Wakefield) fell 33.2%, matching District 9 as the steepest percentage decline. District 7 (Mott Haven, Hunts Point) lost 27.1%. Even District 11 (Pelham Parkway, Morris Park), which has historically been more stable, shed 19.2%.

The convergence is striking. By 2026, all three focus districts are clustered between 66 and 70 on an index where 2012 equals 100. They began at very different sizes but are declining at nearly identical rates.

What mergers signal

Schools in these districts are increasingly too small to sustain full programming. Chalkbeat reported that roughly two-thirds of the 35 school merger, closure, or grade-removal proposals approved citywide over six years were in the Bronx or Brooklyn. The number of NYC schools with fewer than 200 students doubled from 81 in 2016 to 190, and projections suggest NYC enrollment could fall by another 200,000, or 26%, over the next decade.

"Proposals to consolidate schools are not being generated top down. They really are coming from communities and superintendents." -- Dan Weisberg, NYC First Deputy Chancellor, via Chalkbeat (Oct. 2024)

The city's hold-harmless policy has shielded schools from immediate budget cuts tied to enrollment shortfalls. In 2025-26, schools would have collectively returned over $250 million without the policy. But hold-harmless funding has relied on non-recurring COVID stimulus dollars that are now exhausted. Schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos acknowledged the challenge: "We're committed to providing stability and ensuring every school has the resources it needs."

What comes next

The kindergarten pipeline suggests no reversal is coming. With K enrollment at 5,293 and still falling, these districts are locking in further total enrollment declines for years to come, regardless of what happens to migration patterns or charter competition. Even if kindergarten enrollment stabilized tomorrow, the current K cohort is 46% smaller than the graduating 12th-grade cohort it will eventually replace.

Two-thirds of the school merger proposals that NYC approved over six years landed in the Bronx or Brooklyn. Chalkbeat projects another 200,000 students could leave the city over the next decade. For Districts 8, 9, and 10, which have already lost 39,000, the hold-harmless policy buys time but not students. Somewhere in Morrisania or Throgs Neck, a school built for 500 children is serving 250, and the kindergarten class walking in next September will be smaller than the one that walked in this year.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.