BOSTON — Massachusetts public schools are hemorrhaging students, and the numbers tell a blunt story: immigrant families are fleeing the system as federal immigration enforcement tightens under the Trump administration, ripping away the last thing that had been holding enrollment together.

More than 15,000 students disappeared from Massachusetts public schools between 2024 and 2025, pushing statewide enrollment to its lowest level in 30 years. The losses were swift, concentrated, and brutal — and they landed hardest in districts that for years relied on immigrant families to keep classrooms full.

Boston Public Schools alone lost 1,645 students in a single year, accounting for more than one in ten students lost statewide. That drop came immediately after a rare one-year bump in 2024, which city officials openly credited to new immigrant arrivals. One year later, that boost is gone.

Across the state, the pattern is unmistakable. Chelsea, Everett, Framingham, Marlborough, and other immigrant-heavy districts reported enrollment drops of more than five percent. In Chelsea, officials said last fall that the district was seeing only about one-quarter of its usual number of newcomer students — a stunning collapse for a city long known as a first stop for immigrant families.

Local leaders say families are no longer settling where they once did. Instead, they are pulling back, relocating, or avoiding high-profile gateway cities altogether, driven by fear of enforcement and the sense that certain communities are now under a brighter federal spotlight.

For years, immigration quietly propped up Massachusetts schools as birth rates fell and middle-class families fled high housing costs. That demographic cushion masked deeper problems. Now that it’s gone, the system is exposed.

Statewide enrollment peaked in 2002 at nearly one million students. It slid for nearly two decades, briefly stabilized after COVID, and has now resumed its downward spiral — faster and sharper than before.

In Boston, the decline has been relentless. Enrollment has fallen from more than 63,000 students in 2000 to just 46,514 today, even as the city’s population has grown. Parents have been leaving for years, citing cost, quality concerns, and frustration with the school system. Immigration slowed the damage. It did not stop it.

Now the consequences are piling up. Boston is moving ahead with plans to shut down roughly one-fifth of its school buildings by the end of the decade. Last month, the mayor-appointed School Committee voted to close three more schools, with more closures expected as enrollment continues to sink.

Elsewhere, districts are staring down the same math. State education funding is tied in part to how many students show up. Fewer students means weaker funding growth, even as inflation, health insurance, and special education costs keep climbing. The lights still have to stay on. The buses still have to run.

Even wealthier districts are feeling the drag. Newton and Brookline both lost students again this year, continuing a post-pandemic shift toward private schools among affluent families. The public system is shrinking from both ends.

But the sharpest losses remain clustered in communities that once absorbed new immigrant families year after year. With that flow disrupted, the decline is no longer gradual. It’s sudden, visible, and destabilizing.

State officials say they are studying the data and working with districts to maintain quality and stability. On the ground, the picture looks far messier. Empty seats, tightening budgets, and closure plans are arriving faster than answers.

Massachusetts didn’t just lose students this year. It lost the last buffer protecting its public schools from a long-building demographic collapse. And now the fallout is impossible to ignore.