Public Schools Enrollment Continues To Decline

Enrollment in the Nantucket Public Schools (NPS) fell by another eight students this month, bringing the total decline to 69 since its record high last September and dropping enrollment to its lowest level since 2017.

This is the steepest single-year decline in enrollment, both by raw numbers and percentage, that NPS has seen since the beginning of the district’s enrollment explosion in 2010. Current enrollment sits at 1,662 students, down from 1,724 last June and 1,731 last September.

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. Last October, there were 1,719 students enrolled at NPS. Some month-to-month variation is expected, but this month’s decline is notable because of the importance of October enrollment data and for breaking the barrier of 1,670 students, which NPS has not dipped below in the official data since 2017.

The eight student drop from this September is largely driven by an 11-student decline at Nantucket High School, with the other schools experiencing little change. Hallett suggested that the decline could primarily be the result of students who are attending private schools but were initially incorrectly listed as enrolled at NPS.

“Sometimes that’s not recorded in our very first enrollment,” she said, referring to students attending private schools.

There have only been two years since the turn of the century in which NPS has experienced a larger percentage decline in enrollment: 2000 and 2009, the latter of which occurred during the Great Recession.

Meanwhile, the reported number of homeschooled students in the district hit a new high at 14 this year. That number has oscillated between six and 14 since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Shifts are likely largely due to chance: given how few homeschooled students there are on Nantucket, one family choosing to start or stop homeschooling can singlehandedly cause a proportionally large swing in the number of homeschooled students.

But what is less likely to be caused by random chance is the large and consistent spike from the pre-pandemic numbers. In the 2018-19 year, there was only one reported homeschool student on-island. The following year, there were only three. There haven’t been fewer than six since. That’s consistent with nationwide data showing a jump in homeschooling since the pandemic.

“I think so much of it also has to do with the pretty well-developed homeschooling curriculum materials that happened during and after the pandemic, so we’re seeing now that people are making decisions to homeschool based on the fact that there is so much more out there,” Hallett said. “We hope that those curriculum materials are appropriate.”