Earlier this week, each and every one of D.C.’s public and charter schools did something relatively unspectacular: They counted their kids.
Routine as it may be, the annual count is critical, helping D.C. officials determine exactly how many kids are enrolled citywide. And since funding is attached to enrollment, the count is how D.C. calculates how much money each school will get for the year.
This year, though, the count may count for more.
Relatively flat enrollment in D.C.’s public and charter schools last year is raising concerns that the city may soon face the same downward trend that other states, counties and cities have started experiencing, largely because of declining birth rates but also decreases in the number of families coming into the system or choosing to stay.
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While officials and experts say there’s no immediate crisis, they add that a possible decline in enrollment — after almost 15 years of steady increases — would prompt difficult and uncomfortable questions and policy choices. That could include potentially closing schools, a route Maryland’s Montgomery County is considering.
“We are in a situation where we should be looking at these trends, because we don’t want to get to a point where we’re at a low and don’t have policies to address it,” said Anoosha Imran, an education research analyst with the D.C. Policy Center, a local think tank.
Minus a brief dip during the pandemic, enrollment in D.C. schools has steadily increased over the last two decades, jumping from some 71,280 students in DCPS and charter schools in the 2008-09 school year to 99,555 students in 2024-25.
That largely tracks with the years that D.C.’s economy and population boomed, as did births. Those peaked in 2016, when 9,854 D.C.-resident children were born. But it’s been a steady decline since then, and in 2025 only 7,318 such births were recorded in the city.
“We watch that number particularly carefully, and birth rates become a very important part of our long-term projections because they go through the system,” said Paul Kihn, D.C.’s deputy mayor for education.
The lower birth rates are playing out most clearly in the earlier grades in D.C. schools, notably in the number of families enrolling their kids in pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds, which has been free in D.C. since 2009. According to data from Kihn’s office, enrollment in pre-K dropped 3 percent from the 2024-25 school year to 2025-26. And there are hints it might continue: The number of applications for schools through D.C.’s universal lottery tool hit 20,987 this year, down from 23,312 two years ago.
In the past, people moving into D.C. could offset the decreases in local births, but that has recently changed — in large part because of federal immigration policies. And those same policies may have contributed to one of the biggest enrollment decreases D.C. schools saw in the 2025-26 school year: Latino students, whose enrollment fell 3.8%.
Kihn said it’s too early to panic; he hopes if any enrollment declines occur this school year, they are gentle. “But if it’s something bigger than that, then that would be concerning,” he said.
If the enrollment decline picks up steam, city officials and experts agree it could prompt difficult decisions about whether to keep certain schools open — especially as the city’s budget is getting leaner. Those conversations would likely initially focus on schools that are already underenrolled. According to an annual assessment of school utilization across D.C., 18 DCPS schools and 15 charter schools are under 50% enrolled relative to their capacity.
“It’s hard to operate schools that are significantly underenrolled. It can be harmful for the rest of the District. It’s also bad for those students. How do you provide those students with robust services if you only have 200 to 300 students? It’s very expensive to have a nurse, it’s very expensive in high school to have a range of AP courses,” said Chad Aldeman, an educational analyst and consultant, speaking this week during a conference organized by the D.C. Policy Center.
But closing underenrolled schools would pose challenges. Many are in Wards 7 and 8, where incomes and educational indicators have lagged other parts of D.C. Additionally, past rounds of school closures — 23 in 2008 and 13 in 2013 — targeted a number of DCPS schools in those neighborhoods.
Responding to Aldeman, Kaya Henderson, who was DCPS chancellor from 2010 to 2016 and oversaw one round of school closures, argued that any future decisions on closing schools have to be based on more than just raw enrollment numbers.
“I want to resist the frame that let’s just look at places that are underenrolled and cut there, because over in Wards 7 and 8 those kids need a more robust educational infrastructure than potentially kids in Ward 3. That’s just our reality,” she said.
Kihn said that as decisions like these approach, DCPS and charters — which operate independently from each other — will have to cooperate and coordinate, something that historically hasn’t happened between two sectors that were set up to compete.
“What you don’t want is if you lose thousands of kids, for example, and then you’ve got DCPS over here making some decisions about how they should respond and you’ve got the charter sector over here making some decisions,” he said. “What you want to have is a coherent citywide approach.”
Officials and experts say that D.C. shouldn’t just assume the inevitability of school enrollment dropping and the difficult responses that would require, but also find ways to encourage families to remain in the city. That includes continuing to invest in the city’s schools, which have seen gains in test scores and achievement, while also taking steps to make D.C. more affordable for families.
“When you look at things like how expensive it is to raise a child in the District when your average cost of early learning is $26,000 a year on top of some of the most expensive rent in the country, it is hard to have and grow a family in the District,” said Joanna Blotner, government affairs director for D.C. Action, which advocates for kid-friendly policies. “All of those things need to be taken into consideration.”
Blotner said D.C. should continue pushing to expand the supply of child care and bring down its cost, something that Ward 4 Council member Janeese Lewis George, who is likely to be the city’s next mayor, has said she will focus on.
“If we have folks who are investing in enrolling their kids in early-learning programs and seeing the District as family-friendly,” Blotner said, “they’re more likely to want to stay in the District long-term.”
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