Across Miami-Dade and Broward counties, about 13,000 fewer students are expected in public schools next school year, an alarming drop that could lead to further cuts after each district's budget slashed tens of millions from this school year's budgets.
While changing immigration patterns and competition from private schools are playing a central role in this, another ongoing, key factor adds to the strain: a historic decline in birth rates that will cut numbers even more dramatically in coming years.
The scenario is playing out not just across South Florida districts, but also presents a nationwide challenge.
READ MORE: 'Unprecedented' drops in enrollment in Miami-Dade schools loom over budget
Historically, the birth rate was a strong indicator of how many incoming kindergarteners a district would receive five years after the child was born. In 2007, the birth rate in the U.S. was 2.1 children per woman. It has dropped steadily every year since and by 2024, it was just under 1.6 children per woman — the lowest in United States history.
"Experts project that it is only going to continue dropping," said Tara Moon, a policy analyst at Future Ed, an independent non-partisan education policy think tank at Georgetown University. "Fewer children are being born every year, so fewer students are entering the education system. We especially, of course, then see these impacts in the earlier grades."
In Broward County schools this school year, for example, there were 75,400 students in kindergarten through 5th grade. The prediction for next school year is 2,000 fewer than that. And by the 2030-31 school year, Broward County Public Schools projects that group will have shrunk by 10,800.
The birth rate in Broward County is the lowest it's been since 2006, at 10.1 per 1,000 total population in 2024, according to data from the Florida Department of Health.
Kindergarten enrollment, Moon said, is a "pretty reputable kind of reflection of the impacts of declining birth rates." It fell by 215,000 students, nearly 6%, nationwide.
"And while this wasn't the largest drop of any grade — that was sixth grade — it was very significant in the context of all of the grades" as children age into the public education system she said.
In Palm Beach County schools, the projected decrease in enrollment over five years is 731.
The state funds the district based on enrollment — the fewer students a district has, the less money it receives to run the hundreds of schools that belong to it. In Miami-Dade County schools this year, an unprecedented enrollment decrease of about 13,000 students already thinned the district's budget by nearly $200 million. In Broward County, next school year's student count is expected to decline by 5,000 students; the district's budget was $90 million in the hole this year.
Why is the birth rate down?
Feeling various stressors and lack of support, more women are choosing to not have children or have less of them.
Mothers and women want what's best for them and their child, explained Viviana Alvarado Pacheco, senior director of research and collective impact at the Women's Fund Miami-Dade.
One of the driving factors in making that decision is financial stability and mobility.
" If a single mom, for example, has an infant and a school-aged child, she needs to be making $95,000 a year," Alvarado Pacheco said. "That means that she needs to make an hourly wage of $45 and our current minimum wage is less than $15 an hour. So there's this huge burden... on the parents to make this enormous amount of money just to meet basic necessities."
There was a slight increase in births after the pandemic lockdown in 2021 and 2022. In Miami-Dade County, the numbers those years were around 28,100 and 29,750 births, respectively. Alvarado Pacheco said this could have been related to the Covid stimulus checks that were distributed at the time.
"That economic boost that a lot of families got, which might've been very small, but they made a huge impact. So you had families that were like, 'Okay, yeah. It makes sense for me to have children right now,'" she said.
It also helped that work was fully remote at the time and parents didn't have to leave home and find childcare, which is costly. The flexibility "was much more accommodating to their needs," she said.
But the slight boost in the birth rate five and four years ago isn't enough to mitigate plummeting enrollment.
"If you just looked at the district as a factor of birth rates, we would actually be going up," said the chief financial officer of Miami-Dade County Public Schools Ron Steiger, "but that's not what happening. We're projecting a decrease."
Incoming groups
Every year, districts predict how many students they expect to have next school year. Multiple factors are considered in addition to birth rate, including the cost of living affecting families' ability to stay in the area and newly arrived students. This school year’s enrollment calculation in Miami-Dade County was off by thousands.
Not because of students leaving, the superintendent says, but because there’s no incoming group to offset the loss. Particularly because less immigrants are coming to the country.
“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 a March committee meeting. “This year that number was 3,000. That's where the majority of our enrollment was down.”
Plus, Steiger told WLRN recently, school choice options create more competition for the district to attract students.
"Unlike in the past when we would capture all of these students, right now, when a kid's born and when they get to kindergarten, they can use public funds to go to a charter school, a district school or private school. So we might not capture all of those students any longer."
This competition between education options in Florida complicates how districts prepare.
" When the district was a monopoly, when we were the only really K-12 player in town, other than a few private schools, it was really easy to do projections because we knew exactly how many kids we were going to have."
Declining enrollment is forcing districts to downsize their footprint, including by closing and consolidating schools.
Moon, the policy analyst in Georgetown University, believes the discussion around enrollment should revolve around the existing students and families affected "rather than the students who are leaving or just not being born in the first place."
