Sign up for Chalkbeat Newark’s free newsletter to get the latest news about the city’s public school system delivered to your inbox.Newark Public Schools lost students for the first time in six years, a stark difference from the year-over-year growth that has set it apart from trends in districts across the country over the past five school years. In the 2025-26 school year, the district enrolled 43,216 students, down 764 from the 2024-25 school year when the district enrolled 43,980, according to fall enrollment data from the state released Thursday. That’s a turn for a district that had surged by almost 20% since 2019, driven largely by a rise in Hispanic student enrollment and multilingual learners. This year, the district’s largest student demographic drivers, powered by an influx of immigrant families and multilingual learners, are beginning to slow.The district is also edging closer to national trends where enrollment has dropped by nearly 1.3 million students since the COVID-19 pandemic, partly due to declining birth rates and shifts in migration. The steepest drop this year hit the district’s multilingual learner population. Newark enrolled 11,879 multilingual learners in the 2025-26 school year, down 744 from the previous year when that population surpassed 12,000 for the first time. At the same time, Hispanic student enrollment grew by 460 this school year, according to fall enrollment data. It’s unclear from the state’s data if the decline in multilingual learners is a result of those students leaving the district or transitioning out of English learner programs and back into general education.More than 720 fewer white students attended Newark’s public schools in 2025-26 than in the fall of the year prior, as did 488 fewer Black students. The number of Asian American students remained around the same from the prior year.Additionally, early grade levels and transition grades showed the sharpest enrollment declines this year. Compared to last school year, first grade lost 221 students and kindergarten fell by 154. Also compared to last year, seventh grade fell by 197 students and ninth grade by 140 students, major grade level transition years.During January’s board retreat meeting, Superintendent Roger León said the district’s enrollment decline was close to 818 students, but he didn’t say what subgroups contributed to that decline. He cautioned that the fall enrollment numbers were a snapshot from October and do not take into account students who arrive later in the school year. “I can’t tell you who they are, because there were kids who came and left in the process just by October,” León said. “That shows and proves that we have a high mobility rate.”Newark’s enrollment surge in previous years set it apart from neighboring New York City, which lost some 100,000 students since before the pandemic and Philadelphia schools, which are down nearly 10,000 students since the 2019-20 school year. But whether this year’s dip is a one-year anomaly or the start of a longer trend will depend heavily on whether the city continues to attract and retain immigrant families who drove much of the district’s recent growth. At the January retreat, León said of the multilingual students who left the district, a “large number” of those students left the state and a “significant number of them” left the country. Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.
