By Joe Siegel
The total enrollment for the 2025-2026 school year is 2,588 students, a slight increase over the 2024-2025 school year’s 2,524.
However, enrollment in the Dighton-Rehoboth Regional School District has generally shown a downward trend over the last decade, decreasing from approximately 2,900 students in 2018-2019 to 2,524 for the 2024-2025 school year.
DESE (Department of Elementary and Secondary Education) reported enrollment in Massachusetts K-12 public schools has dropped to its lowest level in three decades. The decrease in students for the 2025-2026 school year reflects one of the largest enrollment declines since the Covid-19 pandemic.
Total enrollment as of fall 2025 dropped by 15,442 students — a 1.6 percent total decrease from the start of the previous school year. There are 900,490 students enrolled in Massachusetts this year, the lowest figure since 1994, when the state enrolled just under 896,000 students.
According to a study conducted by Boston University, “The pandemic induced a substantial enrollment shift away from public schools in fall 2020 and a partial return of students in fall 2021, leaving longer-term impacts unclear. Public school losses are almost entirely concentrated in middle grades (5-8), where enrollment is down 8 percent, suggesting families place particular weight on those ages when making post-pandemic schooling choices. Five years in, the pandemic has had sustained effects on the size and demographic composition of public schools.”
The study also revealed a growing ambivalence toward public education.
“The sustained decline in public school enrollment observed here is consistent with evidence that Americans, including K–12 parents, have lower satisfaction with schools even years after school closures ended,” the study noted. “Between 2019 and 2025, the fraction of Americans reporting satisfaction with public education dropped by 12 percentage points, as did the fraction of K–12 parents reporting satisfaction with their oldest child’s school. The fraction of parents saying K–12 education is heading in the wrong direction was fairly stable from 2019 to 2022 but rose in 2023 and then again in 2024 to its highest level in a decade, suggesting continuing or even growing frustration with schools.”
The entire study can be accessed at: https://wheelockpolicycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/MASchoolEnrollment_WP-June2025.pdf
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