Nantucket Public School Enrollment Continues To Fall

Enrollment at the Nantucket Public Schools has dropped by another six students, falling to 1,604. Enrollment has now fallen by around 6.7 percent in two years, a striking reversal of the explosive growth the district saw throughout the 2010s.

October enrollment data is particularly important, as this is the data that will be sent to the state and largely used for official purposes this year. Some month-to-month variation is expected throughout the year, but the bottom line will remain the same: Nantucket’s student population appears to be shrinking—and it appears to be doing so relatively quickly.

The reasons for the decline are unclear. It is possible more students are attending private school, though if so, Superintendent Elizabeth Hallett does not think they are attending other schools on the island.

The six-student drop from September to October may be more driven by private school enrollment than the overall decline. Last year, Hallett said that sometimes students who have left the district are incorrectly listed as still being enrolled on Nantucket at the start of the year. This is then corrected for in the October data.

Hallett previously suggested that this year’s decrease could be partially the result of broader structural factors, including a general trend of decreasing enrollment across Massachusetts and a hostile political climate that may discourage some immigrant families from attending public school.

“Enrollment across the Cape has been going down,” Hallett said. “We are seeing enrollment in the state of Massachusetts going down, and particularly in Cape Cod we are seeing enrollment continuing to trend downward. Most likely this is attributable to the higher cost of living on Cape Cod. Also, they are seeing less growth in the multilingual populations that they have.”

There is no reliable data on how Nantucket’s year-round population has changed since 2020, but if it has begun to decline after years of growth, that could also explain the drop in public school enrollment.

Homeschooling did reach a historic high this year. Before the pandemic, there was a single child listed as homeschooled on Nantucket. Since 2020, that number has slowly begun to creep upwards, and it has increased for the last three years in a row, though the overall numbers are so small that it is difficult to determine how much of the change is attributable to an actual shift in how families are approaching education on Nantucket and how much is the result of random chance.

There are now 21 students listed as homeschooled on Nantucket, which is seven students higher than last year, but that increase does little to explain the much larger drop in Nantucket Public School enrollment. Homeschooling has become more common nationwide, and Nantucket’s rates of homeschooling are comparable to similar communities in the area.

Nantucket’s school district saw dramatic growth throughout the 2010s. Enrollment then leveled off for the first half of the 2020s. Now, it is declining. The decline is important because some of the district’s funding comes from the state and is determined in part by enrollment. The news isn’t all bad, however. Lower enrollment can also allow the district to explore new opportunities and reallocate funds as student-teacher ratios fall and the amount of resources required to support the student population drops.