The Miami-Dade County School Board unanimously adopted a $7.4 billion budget for the 2026-27 school year, but board members said cuts are likely to come throughout the year as plummeting student enrollment shows no sign of improvement.
The budget was pieced together based on enrollment projections, but the loss that played out at the start of the school year surpassed the prediction. District and state enrollment numbers for Miami-Dade County Public Schools show there are 18,910 fewer students now compared to the end of the 2025-26 school year.
“ I was very concerned that the budget was created on an enrollment figure that isn't quite matching what we have,” board member Mary Blanco said at Wednesday’s meeting. “I wanted to ensure that we were still okay to go forward with this budget.”
“ I am aware of the financial crisis that we are dealing with and understand that we have to make some very difficult decisions,” said board chair Mari Tere Rojas.
Before the budget hearing, the School Board voted to reorganize central office roles, a decision estimated to save $1.6 million for the district.
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Part of the difficult decisions to come could include closing and consolidating schools. But that’s the last thing Rojas wants.
“As I've always stated in the past, our schools should be the last ones that we should be touching. We need to look at everything everywhere else,” she said.
"All of our dollars have to go back into our schools," superintendent Rafael Villalobos told reporters this week. "So it's a consolidation of district, central staff and schools."
Rojas requested the superintendent submit a budget plan to the board immediately after the enrollment counts are updated in October.
Halfway through the last school year, the board docked the budget by $89 million.
Board member Roberto Alonso noted how difficult that was for principals, who had to deal with the changes after they had allocated funds in their schools for the year.
“So the one thing that I would ask of staff is that we're transparent to our principals,” Alonso said, so “they're prepared for that and that it's not a surprise sort of situation that we had last year.”
The district is preparing best it can if it continues to lose students at such a drastic pace. Even as more belt tightening is expected, a reserve of $40 million could lift some of the weight, according to Margarita Betancourt, interim Chief Financial Officer, who presented the budget.
Despite the strains, the work to teach students “still must get done,” said United Teachers of Dade president Antonio White.
“Enrollment may be declining, but the value of the employees doing that work certainly is not,” he said.
