In May, parents and teachers packed a city council meeting in Methuen, Mass. One mother worried that her son, then a fifth-grader who plays trombone, would lose his chance to play in a band. Middle-school band was on the list of possible cuts. So were elementary science and more than 100 jobs. A big part of the reason is that there are fewer kids.
The Journal's Chao Deng went to Methuen, a city of about 55,000 near the New Hampshire border. Plenty of other towns face the same fight. Public K-12 enrollment was 48.8 million in 2025-26. That's down 3.7% from 2017-18, by Georgetown professor Marguerite Roza's analysis of federal data. A big cause is fewer children. U.S. births peaked in 2007, and today's kindergarten classes reflect the babies who weren't born five or six years ago. Roza and other demographers expect the decline to continue and maybe speed up. As she told the Journal, "We definitely have too many schools for how many kids we have."
Here's why that hits a budget. Massachusetts, like most states, hands out school aid by head count. But staff, buildings and services cost a lot whether the rooms are full or not. Nearby Dracut is weighing closing an elementary school that shrank to 210 students from almost 300. It may also cut busing for some grades and halve full-day kindergarten. North Andover closed an elementary school last year and moved about 200 students. In some places, housing costs, private schools and, school officials say, federal immigration policies push enrollment down further.
Smaller classes, bigger needs
Michelle Reitano teaches kindergarten in Methuen. In recent years her classes have run 16 to 18 kids, down from 20 to 24 when she started there in 2012. But more of those kids have autism or other special needs, and more are learning English. "Enrollment is falling but the needs are rising," she told the Journal. This spring the school committee first approved $118 million for 2026-27. The city said it could afford $114 million. The mayor found an extra $800,000 to help keep after-school programs. Some teachers who'd been let go were called back, and in the end only dozens of positions were cut. Those cuts still took K-6 teachers, medical assistants, counselors, a multilingual teacher and a technology specialist. A planned financial-literacy program got shelved too. The one class about money lost out to money. On the Journal's map of enrollment change from 2018 to 2025, California sits in the darkest shade, with the states down 5% or more.
Our read
This is a Retirement · M10 story for the teachers who read us. Enrollment is the number behind your job security. A district with fewer kids and the same buildings reaches for the same tools. Methuen's list shows them. It cut teaching jobs, dropped some Spanish and health classes, and shared one librarian across its K-8 schools. Your pension formula doesn't care why a year went missing. In most traditional teacher plans, it multiplies your years of service, your final pay and a factor. Lose a year to a layoff, and unless your plan lets you buy it back, the formula prints a smaller number for life. A frozen pay step does the same thing through your final pay.
The thing in your own plan this story touches is the service-credit line on your pension statement, and the size of your emergency fund. This week, open your latest statement from CalSTRS, CalPERS or your state's plan. Check your years of service credit against your own count. Then count how many months your emergency fund would cover if a layoff notice came in the spring. In California, preliminary layoff notices for teachers go out by March 15. Methuen called some teachers back, but the cushion has to carry you until you know. Teachers know this drill. The fire drill happens on a sunny day. If the months come up short, that's a conversation worth having before budget season, not during it.