The January 7 School Committee meeting was the first regularly scheduled biweekly meeting of the recently elected 2026-2027 School Committee, and it was led by new Chair Alicia Piedalue. In her regular update, Superintendent Anna Nolin highlighted the Kindergarten enrollment period starting on March 2 and requested families with children approaching Kindergarten age to return surveys sent to them by NPS, even if they are not planning to enroll in NPS.
Enrollment Report
Katy Hogue, NPS Chief of Data and Research, presented key findings of the latest NPS Enrollment Analysis Report, which described enrollment outcomes for the current school yea and projections for the next five years. The current year’s NPS enrollment is 11,335 students, a 1.4% decline from last year. The last five years since 2021-2022 have an average decline of about 1.0% annually, following a large 5.6% decline during the first Covid-influenced academic year, 2020-2021.
Dr. Hogue noted that small declines were further expected for the next two academic years, before the student population stabilizes at 11,150 through 2031. Included in this assumption is an additional 544 students based on estimates of new families living in 18 new housing developments that already have building permits. Other key factors driving the forecast included Cohort Survival Ratio (CSR), which is the number of students in each grade who return to NPS for the next grade, and birth-to-Kindergarten ratios, which are the number of NPS Kindergarten enrollees compared with the number of babies born in Newton 5 years earlier.
Notable trends included over 100 transfers back into each high school from private school this academic year, and the increasing CSR of 5th-to-6th grade students versus previous years. Dr. Nolin hypothesized that this higher CSR may be because families that enrolled in private school in 2020 during Covid are the same families that would have otherwise left NPS after 5th grade in 2025 had they not already left five years ago. The wide range of the amount of families in a given elementary school zone who enroll in private school — ranging from 6.7% (Franklin zone) to over 40% (Ward zone) was also discussed.
Dr. Nolin also stated that the enrollment forecasts are the “backdrop to [the] arrays of [the number of] elementary school classrooms, and team sizes for middle school and high school” for which the district plans, and that she and the NPS staff “watch like a hawk” how many students are enrolling.
NPS Budget Guidelines
After the enrollment report, the Committee reviewed the draft Budget Guidelines document, which represents the School Committee’s direction to the NPS staff for the district’s priorities when formulating the budget for the 2026-2027 academic year. The majority of the School Committee’s discussion centered around the relative ranking of budget priorities in the Guidelines, as well as the number of priorities, which was based on a survey circulated to the members prior to the meeting. Linda Swain (Ward 2) raised a concern that, in contrast with voter feedback she reported receiving during her 2025 campaign, “breadth” of NPS courses was placed in the same sentence as quality, implying the existence of a large number of elective courses was of equal importance to the quality of core courses.
The January 7 meeting is available on NewTV.
January 5th meeting materials
Prior to this meeting, on January 5th the School Committee convened a retreat covered by Fig City News. Since then, the NPS website has populated materials from that retreat, including a meeting summary, a more detailed agenda, a Committee member handbook, and an updated NPS Central Office organization chart. The organizational chart lists the DEI Department as a direct report to Superintendent Nolin, in contrast to the reorganization memorandum sent to the School Committee last spring, which had placed the DEI department within the Human Resources department.
