A version of this column was originally published on the In Focus substack, which you can find and subscribe to by clicking here. If you want to see the data table, scroll to the bottom of this page, where every district in the Finger Lakes is tracked.
Every few years I dig into New York State Education Department enrollment data to see where school districts across the Finger Lakes actually stand. I started doing it as a winter exercise when I was still a beat reporter here at FL1. It was something to analyze when the news cycle slowed after the holidays. It mattered then, and matters now more than ever because enrollment trends ripple into taxes, property values, whether young families move in or move away, and ultimately what kind of educational opportunities exist for the kids already here.
What does the new data say? How does it compare to the original effort several years ago?
The first time I pulled the data was around the 2018–19 school year. I put together a simple table showing enrollment across local districts, and it ended up getting far more attention than I expected. Teachers, local officials, and community members all reached out about it.
Around that same time, I sat down with one of the few superintendents in the region willing to speak candidly about the reality many districts were facing.
The decline, he said, had been building for decades. Many districts were already 30 to 45 percent smaller than they had been in the 1980s or 1990s. At the same time, the taxpaying population was shrinking and the cost of educating students was climbing rapidly. Pretending districts could simply keep operating the same way indefinitely — or kick the problem down the road forever — was, in his words, unserious.
And that was before the pandemic.
What made that conversation even more striking was who was saying it. The superintendent was leading Auburn City Schools, one of the few districts in the region with enough population to be at least temporarily insulated from the worst effects of enrollment decline.
Yet he seemed to be showing the most urgency.
His message was simple: Districts should start thinking about merging with neighbors while they still have control over what that looks like.
This past winter, a couple things brought that old exercise back to mind. A professor from a local university reached out asking about how I had collected the enrollment data years ago. At the same time, I kept seeing coverage of the ongoing debate over New York’s electric school bus mandate — another policy with potentially significant cost implications for districts that are already under pressure.
So I went back to the numbers.
The dataset includes every school district in counties most people consider part of the Finger Lakes: Cayuga, Ontario, Schuyler, Seneca, Steuben, Tompkins, Wayne, and Yates. Some of those counties technically belong to other economic development regions, but culturally and economically they function as a single interconnected area.
The numbers tell a story that should surprise no one — but the scale of it is still striking.
Across the 55 districts included in the dataset, enrollment fell from 106,300 students in 1979 to 66,419 in 2025. That’s a decline of roughly 37.5 percent over the last half-century.
On its own, that would be significant. What’s more concerning is what has happened recently.
Since 2019, enrollment across those same districts has dropped from 72,542 students to 66,419 — an 8.4 percent decline in just six years. The long-term trend isn’t just continuing. It’s accelerating.
And that matters, because it changes the nature of the conversation.
When enrollment declines gradually over decades, communities can explain it away as demographic drift. A sharper drop over a shorter period is harder to dismiss. It means districts are no longer simply adjusting to smaller student populations over time. They’re responding to a faster erosion of the enrollment base that supports staffing, programming, and long-term stability.
This doesn’t mean Finger Lakes school districts are about to collapse overnight. New York’s education funding system makes that unlikely in the very short term. State aid continues to provide a significant buffer against enrollment losses. Assuming there aren’t any massive, state-mandated costs school districts are expected to take on alone.
But “unsustainable” in New York rarely means a district suddenly shuts its doors. More often, it shows up as a steady weakening of what a district can realistically offer.
Across the region, 33 of the 55 districts in the dataset already enroll fewer than 1,000 students. Twenty-one are below 750. Eight are below 500. Two are below 300.
There’s no official threshold where a district suddenly becomes unviable. But there are practical realities that come with operating at those scales.
A district can remain technically functional while becoming increasingly fragile in practice. Course catalogs shrink. Electives disappear. Athletics combine with nearby districts. Vacancies become harder to fill. Shared services expand.
As time goes on, the overall educational experience becomes thinner.
Those changes also tend to arrive slowly enough that communities adapt to them without always recognizing what’s happening.
If the current trajectory continues, those pressures will intensify. Based on the rate of decline since 2019, roughly two-thirds of the districts in this dataset could be under 1,000 students within the next decade. Many would fall below 750. A growing number would dip under 500.
That doesn’t mean school buildings suddenly close. But it does mean more communities will be forced to confront questions they’ve largely avoided.
How small can a district get before its current structure stops making sense?
How many students are needed to support a meaningful high school experience?
And how much thinning of programs will communities tolerate before they start reconsidering district boundaries or shared-service models?
Those questions aren’t theoretical anymore. In many places, they’re already starting to take shape. Which brings us back to the bigger picture.
If enrollment decline is partly driven by demographic change — and it clearly is — then stabilizing schools requires addressing the broader forces shaping the region’s population.
The simplest answer is also the least controversial among economists and regional planners: Abundance.
More housing.
When communities allow more housing to be built, it spreads the tax burden, makes it easier for businesses to grow, and creates opportunities for people to move into the region. Families follow jobs. Students follow families. And school enrollment stabilizes.
The Finger Lakes economy still relies heavily on small businesses, tourism, agriculture, and regional employers. Those sectors can grow — but only if workers have somewhere to live.
Without that growth, the math becomes difficult to escape.
School districts — one of the last remaining institutions tied closely to local identity in many small towns — will gradually disappear. Not because communities want them to, but because maintaining dozens of extremely small standalone districts eventually becomes financially and structurally unrealistic.
And policy decisions could accelerate the pressure. If the state moves forward with mandates like the transition to fully electric school buses without fully funding the cost of vehicles and charging infrastructure — that strain could make many of the districts in this dataset unsustainable on its own.
But make no mistake — this isn’t hyperbole. It’s just the numbers.
The Finger Lakes isn’t facing a sudden cliff. It’s facing a long squeeze.
And slow-moving problems are often the hardest ones for communities to confront — because they’re easy to rationalize and even easier to postpone. But the trend is clear.
The question isn’t whether enrollment decline is happening. It’s whether communities are willing to respond before the consequences become insurmountable.
Josh is the Vice President of FingerLakes1.com. Have a question? Send them to [email protected].