Despite already slashing its budget halfway through this school year, the Miami-Dade County school district is set to make further cuts in 2027-28 amid an "unprecedented" enrollment drop, the district's financial chief told WLRN.
Miami-Dade County schools, the third largest district in the country, this academic year had 313,000 students — 13,200 fewer than in the 2024-25 school year.
Although the district has gone through financial crises in the past, from hurricanes to the 2008 recession, this situation is different, according to district's Chief Financial Officer Ron Steiger. “ It's not unprecedented that we're dealing with a serious problem," he said. "What’s unprecedented is this particular problem that we're dealing with.”
At $7.4 billion this school year’s budget was already $100 million smaller than the previous year’s. Even so, the district shrunk that even more when it docked the budget by another $89 million halfway through the school year. As Florida lawmakers craft the state budget, MDCPS could potentially cut another $52 million in next school year’s budget.
The state requires districts to maintain a reserve level of 3%. Currently, Miami-Dade County schools is below that level. For next year, it asked lawmakers to release one-time extra funding of $21 million to help offset the enrollment drop.
If the district doesn’t find ways to tighten the belt, then “we'll run into the same problem with reserves every year — and we can't,” Steiger said at a March committee meeting with school board members and the superintendent. “We have to be able to fix this once and for all.”
That means the district will have “to do business differently than we've ever done it before,” Steiger said.
Thinning enrollment
Public school systems all over the country are dealing with thinning enrollment. In Florida, the reason has been largely attributed to parents increasingly opting for charter and private schools, which have become more popular thanks to an expansion of vouchers. But Miami-Dade County district officials push back against this. Instead, they say it’s because of a decrease in immigrant families moving to South Florida.
The state funds the district based on enrollment — the more students a district has, the more money it receives. Every year, districts predict how many students they expect to leave the district. Multiple factors are considered, including rising cost of living pushing families out and birth rate fluctuations. This school year’s enrollment calculation was off by thousands. Not because of students leaving, the superintendent says, but because there’s no incoming group to offset the loss.
READ MORE: Enrollment in Miami-Dade schools is lower at the start of this year. Why?
“Within the past three to four years, we typically register between 14,000 to 22,000 new students from other countries,” superintendent Jose Dotres said at that March committee meeting. “This year that number was 3,000. That's where the majority of our enrollment was down.”
Still, students leaving the district remain an important factor. “ We're watching withdrawals more than we've ever had,” Dotres said.
“Up until the last 20 years, the district never really had declining enrollment other than a really short period, I think, in the 1970s,” Steiger told WLRN. “The district basically only knew one thing: it knew growth.”
The state calculates Miami-Dade County schools will see a drop of 6,800 students next year. But with what the district now knows about how immigration is playing a role, Steiger estimates it’ll be closer to 8,000 students.
“ We have always been a port of entry, but when people — when students — aren't entering the country, then we don't have those in those new enrollees,” Steiger said, “and so that, when you think about it, an 8,000 kid loss actually seems very reasonable."
If the forecast of an 8,000-student loss comes true next year, on top of the reductions from this school year, the district is looking at being out $14.9 million.
Impact on learning
As the district crunches enrollment and budget numbers, Steiger said the focus is on how it’ll impact learning.
Of the $7.4 billion budget this year, $4.4 billion is spent on school operations, Steiger told WLRN. “If we lose $100 million, it's very difficult not to impact the classroom in some way.”
Charter schools represent over a billion of the overall district budget.
“ While a $7.4 billion budget sounds large," Steiger said, “a loss of any funds — but certainly $100 million — has a substantial impact and our goal is to mitigate that as much as possible.”
That could come in the form of closing or consolidating schools that are under-resourced and also looking at staff reductions. The number of positions at the central office has shrunk by over 50% since the district’s peak of enrollment in 2003-04, Steiger said.
“You have to become a leaner organization,” Steiger said. “If you don't adjust, if you continue on the path you've been — while losing kids, while losing revenue — then it's existential.”
