Students walking down the halls at Early College Prep High School in Queens on Thursday, September 4, 2025. Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office

As the migrant crisis recedes, enrollment in city Department of Education schools is back in free fall, but with no sign it’ll translate to lower spending anytime soon.

DOE enrollment for 2025-’26 is down 2.4% from the year before, a drop of 22,000 students to about 884,400 total as of Oct. 31, Chalkbeat New York reports.

That’s the biggest decline since the 2021-’22 school year, after which a total of some 50,000 “asylum seeker” children kept the numbers up.

As a result, two-thirds of city schools have fewer students than budgeted for at the year’s start. Since schools are supposed to be funded based on the number of students,

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