Rochester - EdTribune NH - New Hampshire Education Data

Manchester's Quiet Turnaround: 4-Year Streak Lifts NH's Largest District

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Manchester^↗, the district New Hampshire has spent a generation worrying about, is doing something it has almost never done: getting better.

The state's largest city graduated 75.6 percent of its Class of 2025 — the fourth consecutive year of improvement and the culmination of a climb from the 67.8 percent trough posted by the Class of 2021. That 7.8 percentage-point gain over four years is the longest active improvement streak of any large district in the state.

The timing makes it more remarkable. Manchester improved in 2025 while the statewide rate crashed 1.6 points. It improved while Concord^↗, the capital, dropped to 73.0 percent. It improved while 20 districts hit all-time lows.

Where Manchester Started

To appreciate the 2025 number, you have to understand how deep the hole was. Manchester has been New Hampshire's lowest-performing large district for as long as the data exists. In 2015, its 75.8 percent graduation rate trailed the state average by more than 12 points. When COVID hit, the rate cratered: 70.2 percent for the Class of 2020, then 67.8 percent for the Class of 2021 — meaning one in three Manchester students did not graduate on time.

The four-year recovery has been steady rather than dramatic: 72.1 percent in 2022, 73.5 percent in 2023, 74.2 percent in 2024, and 75.6 percent in 2025. Each step was a small gain — 1 to 4 points — but the consistency matters. Manchester has not posted four consecutive increases at any other point in the dataset.

What Hasn't Changed

The progress is real, but the context tempers it. Manchester's 2025 rate of 75.6 percent is essentially the same as its 2015 rate of 75.8 percent. After a decade that included a collapse and a recovery, the district ended up back where it started.

And the dropout rate remains stubbornly high. Manchester posted an 11.4 percent dropout rate in 2025 — five times the state average and the highest among large districts by a wide margin. Over 11 years, Manchester has never recorded a dropout rate below 8.4 percent, and it has exceeded 10 percent in eight of those years. In raw numbers, 110 Manchester students dropped out of the Class of 2025, roughly one-third of all dropouts statewide from a single district.

When combined with the 75.6 percent graduation rate and the 11.4 percent dropout rate, about 13 percent of Manchester's cohort falls into the "unaccounted" category — still enrolled, transferred, or pursuing alternative credentials. That is higher than the state's 10.3 percent but lower than some might expect given the district's challenges.

Manchester Among Its Peers

The 2025 results reshuffled the hierarchy among New Hampshire's cities. Manchester, historically at the bottom, now outperforms Concord (73.0 percent). Nashua^↗, long viewed as Manchester's more successful neighbor, has closed from a 14-point advantage in 2015 to just 7 points.

Meanwhile, Dover^↗ surged to an all-time high of 91.5 percent, opening a 16-point gap over Manchester. Rochester^↗ held steady at 82.8 percent. The variation among cities of similar size — from Dover's 91.5 to Manchester's 75.6 — shows how much local context matters in a small state where all five cities share the same funding formula.

A 965-Student Challenge

Manchester's graduating cohort of 965 students is the largest in the state — bigger than Nashua (854), Pinkerton Academy^↗ (742), or Concord (371). In a state where many districts graduate fewer than 100 students, the scale of Manchester's challenge is different in kind.

With 965 students in the cohort, even a 1-point improvement means roughly 10 additional students crossing the stage. The four-year improvement of 7.8 points translates to approximately 75 more students graduating than the 2021 rate would have produced. Whether those additional graduates found their way through credit recovery, extended learning, or simply more effective supports, the district is reaching students it was losing just four years ago.

Manchester did not respond to a request for comment.

Data Source

This analysis uses four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate data from the New Hampshire Department of Education, covering the graduating classes of 2015 through 2025.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

86 NH Districts Hit Record Lows

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Manchester^↗ enrolled 11,712 students this fall. Nashua^↗ enrolled 9,501. Both are the lowest totals either district has posted in 15 years of state enrollment data. They are not outliers. They are not even unusual. In 2025-26, 86 of 193 New Hampshire districts with five or more years of enrollment history are at their lowest point in the dataset, a share of 44.8%. Only 11 districts are at all-time highs. Seven of those 11 are charter schools.

The ratio of record lows to record highs is 7.8 to 1. Decline in New Hampshire is not a pocket phenomenon confined to rural towns or struggling cities. It is the default condition.

Every major district, the same story

All 10 of New Hampshire's largest districts sit at record lows in 2026. Not eight. Not nine. All 10. Manchester has shed 3,824 students since its 2012 peak, a 24.6% decline. Nashua has lost 2,393, or 20.1%. Concord^↗, the state capital, is down 1,087 students, 22.4% below its peak.

The losses span regions and community types. Bedford^↗, an affluent suburb south of Manchester, is down 12.8%. Rochester^↗, an old mill city on the Maine border, is down 17.3%. Timberlane Regional^↗, a cooperative district serving four towns, has lost 23% of its enrollment since 2012.

Among smaller districts at record lows, the percentage losses are steeper. Farmington^↗ has lost 49.4% of its enrollment since its peak, dropping from 1,379 to 698 students. Franklin is down 36.2%. Newport has declined 35%, and Conway 30.8%.

A population problem, not a school problem

New Hampshire enrolled 190,805 public school students in 2012. By 2026, that figure had fallen to 160,322, a loss of 30,483 students, or 16%.

The decline predates COVID. It predates the expansion of school choice. It predates most policy interventions. Enrollment fell every single year from 2012 through 2020, losing between 963 and 2,843 students annually. The pandemic accelerated the slide: 8,259 students disappeared in a single year between fall 2020 and fall 2021. A brief bounce of 711 students in 2022 proved to be exactly that. The state has since lost 8,298 more students over four years.

The driver is demographic. New Hampshire recorded 11,761 births in 2024, the lowest number in modern times, down from more than 14,000 annually in the early 2000s. Fewer babies born in 2018 and 2019 means fewer kindergartners showing up in 2023 and 2024.

Reaching Higher NH, a nonpartisan education research organization, examined the 2025-26 enrollment data and concluded that the trend extends beyond public schools:

"There's nothing in the data that indicates NH public school students are fleeing for other education types."

Their analysis frames this as structural:

"The decline is not just a public school problem, but a population problem."

Keene Superintendent Robert Malay put it more plainly. "Slowing birth rates are the biggest drag on enrollment," he told the Keene Sentinel. His district, Keene^↗, dropped from 3,284 students in 2015 to 2,941 in 2026, and the decline has reduced state aid by an estimated $1.6 million.

The COVID spike and the long slide

The year-over-year pattern reveals two distinct eras of decline, with a COVID-driven chasm in between.

From 2013 through 2020, New Hampshire lost between 963 and 2,843 students per year. The losses were large but decelerating: by 2019, the annual loss had slowed to 963, the smallest in the series. Then COVID struck, erasing 8,259 students in one year, pushing 115 districts to all-time lows simultaneously.

The 2022 bounce recovered just 711 of those students. Since then, the annual losses of 2,275, 2,422, and 2,338 students have returned to the pace of 2013 and 2014, before the pre-COVID slowdown ever happened. The deceleration that characterized 2017-2019 has been erased.

The count of districts at record lows spiked to 115 during COVID, fell to 58 in 2023 as some districts clawed back students, and has now climbed to 86. Meanwhile, the number at all-time highs has collapsed from a range of 18-29 in 2016-2021 to just 11 in 2026.

Berlin's 14-year unbroken decline

One district has not gained a single student in the entire 15-year dataset. Berlin^↗, a former paper mill city in the state's North Country, has declined every year from 2012 through 2026: 14 consecutive years of losses, from 1,292 students to 959. That is a 25.8% decline with no interruption, no bounce, no year of relief.

Berlin is an extreme case, but the pattern is common across New Hampshire's northern and western communities: aging populations, outmigration of young adults, a shrinking tax base. UNH demographer Kenneth Johnson has described the state as a preview for the nation: high school and college graduates leave, retirees stay, and the median age climbs to 43.4.

Charters grow, but they are not the cause

New Hampshire's charter sector has grown 469% since 2012, from 1,097 students to 6,242. Charter schools now account for 3.89% of total enrollment, up from 0.57%.

Seven of the 11 districts at all-time highs are charter schools, including The Founders Academy (435 students), MicroSociety Academy (363), and The Birches Academy (330). Only four traditional districts, all small, are at record highs: Hollis (686), Nottingham (534), Wentworth (83), and Newington (54).

But charter growth, while real, is too small to explain the traditional sector's losses. Traditional districts have shed 35,628 students since 2012. The charter sector has added 5,145 over the same period. Even if every charter student had been pulled from a traditional school, that transfer would account for less than 15% of the traditional sector's losses.

The state's Education Freedom Account program, which provides vouchers for private school tuition, enrolled about 10,500 students in 2025-26. However, Reaching Higher NH found that the vast majority of EFA recipients were already in private or home school programs before receiving a voucher. Fewer than 500 students statewide switched from public schools to EFAs in the most recent year, representing about 0.3% of public enrollment.

What consolidation looks like in practice

When enrollment declines by a quarter over 15 years, the question becomes what to do with the buildings. Manchester, which has lost 3,824 students, faces an estimated $150 million in deferred maintenance and has received a consultant's recommendation to close four elementary schools and one high school.

At the state level, Republican legislators have proposed consolidating New Hampshire's 107 school administrative units into 12. The proposal reflects a structural oddity: even as enrollment has steadily declined, the state has added administrative units rather than consolidated them. An earlier version of the consolidation bill was voted down unanimously by the full House in 2025, but a revised proposal remains under consideration. Shrinking enrollment and fragmented governance remain on a collision course.

The entering class keeps getting smaller

New Hampshire enrolled 11,904 kindergartners in 2012. By 2026, that number had dropped to 10,727, a 9.9% decline. Given that the state recorded its lowest birth year on record in 2024, the kindergarten class of 2030 will be drawn from an even smaller pool.

Eleven districts are at all-time highs. Seven are charter schools. Four are traditional districts, all small: Hollis, Nottingham, Wentworth, and Newington. Together they enroll 1,357 students. The 86 districts at record lows enroll 101,538. That imbalance is the state's enrollment story in a single frame.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

COVID Erased Four Years of Decline in a Single Year

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 12:00:00 GMT

New Hampshire's public schools had been bleeding students for years before the pandemic. Between 2016 and 2020, the state lost 5,171 students across four school years, a steady trickle of roughly 1,300 per year. Then COVID hit, and the 2020-21 school year wiped out 8,259 students in a single October headcount: a 4.7% plunge that exceeded the previous four years of losses combined.

That was five years ago. The state has recovered 8.6% of what it lost.

The cliff and the long slope after it

The COVID-year loss was structurally different from every other year in the 15-year dataset. At 8,259 students, it was 2.9 times the next-largest single-year drop (2,843 in 2013). In a state where annual losses had been moderating from roughly 2,800 per year in 2013 to under 1,200 by 2020, the pandemic year broke every precedent.

A brief bounce followed. The 2021-22 school year brought back 711 students, the only positive year in the entire 15-year series. But the recovery stalled immediately: the state lost 1,263 students the following year, then 2,275, then 2,422, then 2,338. Post-COVID annual losses have erased the moderation trend that defined the late 2010s.

The result: New Hampshire enrolled 160,322 students in 2025-26. A linear projection of the pre-COVID trend (which itself was declining at about 1,800 per year) would have predicted 164,260. The state is 3,938 students below even the pessimistic trajectory it was already on.

The youngest students vanished first

The pandemic did not hit all grade levels equally. Pre-kindergarten collapsed 35.6%, falling from 4,518 to 2,908 in a single year. Kindergarten dropped 13.5%, losing 1,578 students. PK and K together accounted for 38.6% of the total loss despite representing roughly 9% of enrollment.

What happened next diverges sharply by grade. Pre-K has largely recovered: from its COVID low of 2,908, it climbed back to 4,395 in 2025-26, reaching 97.3% of its pre-COVID level. Parents who delayed preschool eventually sent their children.

Kindergarten did not come back. After rebounding partially to 11,212 in 2021-22, it has fallen every year since, reaching 10,727 in 2025-26, still 8.2% below its pre-COVID count of 11,689. The kindergarten shortfall has a different root cause: New Hampshire's second-lowest birth rate in the nation, which has dropped from roughly 14,000 annual births in the early 2000s to approximately 11,000-12,000 today. The children who should be entering kindergarten in 2025-26 were born in 2019-20, at the tail end of a decade-long birth decline.

Where the damage persists

Five years after the COVID shock, 144 of 191 districts with data for both years remain below their 2019-20 enrollment. That is a 24.6% recovery rate. Among traditional public school districts, it is worse: just 19.0% have recovered, compared to 65.2% of charter-named districts.

Not one of the 23 districts with 2,000 or more students in 2019-20 has returned to pre-COVID levels. Nashua^↗ is down 1,523 students (-13.8%), Manchester^↗ is down 1,506 (-11.4%), Concord^↗ has lost 553 (-12.8%), and Rochester^↗ is down 528 (-12.6%). Together, Nashua and Manchester account for 19.1% of the statewide loss since 2020 despite serving a combined 13.2% of students.

Bedford^↗, an affluent suburb, lost 491 students (-11.1%). Exeter Region Cooperative dropped 511 (-18.5%). Sanborn Regional fell 450 (-28.6%). The losses span geography and community type.

A demographic problem wearing a pandemic mask

The pandemic accelerated a decline already baked in. As NHPR reported in January 2022, New Hampshire's public school enrollment had fallen 18.5% over two decades before COVID arrived. The state's aging population and persistently low birth rate were already compressing the pipeline of school-age children.

COVID added three forces on top of that demographic slide. First, families pulled children from public schools during the disruption. The number of first-time homeschool registrations jumped roughly 50% in 2020. Second, the state launched its Education Freedom Account program in 2021, providing vouchers for private school tuition and other education expenses. By 2024-25, approximately 5,300 students were participating, with the program expanding to universal eligibility in 2025-26 and a 10,000-student enrollment cap.

Third, charter schools grew steadily through and after the pandemic. The charter-named sector enrolled 3,993 students in 2019-20 and 6,242 in 2025-26, a 56.3% increase, while traditional district enrollment fell 10.5%. The Virtual Learning Academy Charter School alone jumped from 349 to 478 students during the COVID year, a 37% increase, as families sought remote-learning alternatives.

Reaching Higher NH, a nonpartisan education research organization, analyzed the 2025-26 data and concluded that the decline is fundamentally demographic:

"The decline is not just a public school problem, but a population problem."

The same analysis found no evidence of a mass exodus to alternative school types, noting that enrollment patterns across public, private, and home education have remained broadly stable as a share of the school-age population.

The fiscal math of fewer students

Fewer students does not mean proportionally lower costs. Schools still need buses, buildings, and heating whether they serve 400 students or 350. As NHPR reported in November 2022, lower enrollment translates directly into less per-pupil state aid, putting local taxpayers on the hook for covering more of the rising costs.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston documented this dynamic across northern New England, finding that New Hampshire's per-pupil expenditures rose 59.8% (inflation-adjusted) since 2000, the highest increase among the three northern New England states. Fewer students, higher per-pupil costs, and a property-tax-dependent funding model create a structural mismatch that compounds with every year of decline.

Meanwhile, the state's administrative structure has moved in the opposite direction of its enrollment. New Hampshire now has more school administrative units than it did two decades ago, 105 in 2025 compared with 85 in 2005, even as enrollment has fallen steadily. Proposals to consolidate SAUs from over 100 to 12 county-based units have drawn pushback from local officials who see consolidation as a threat to community control.

What the next five years look like

The post-COVID acceleration is the most concerning pattern in the data. Before the pandemic, annual losses were moderating: from 2,843 in 2013 to 2,265 in 2016 to just 963 in 2019. The state looked to be approaching a gentler slope. After the brief 2022 bounce, losses have settled at 2,275 to 2,422 per year, erasing that moderation entirely and returning to early-decade rates of decline. The state is not settling back to its pre-pandemic trajectory.

The kindergarten pipeline offers no relief. With annual births running 2,000-3,000 below early-2000s levels, each entering cohort will be smaller than the one it replaces for the foreseeable future. State projections anticipate 1% annual enrollment declines for at least the next decade.

Before the pandemic, losses were moderating. By 2019, the annual decline had slowed to 963 students, the mildest year in the series. There was a reasonable case that New Hampshire was approaching a gentler slope. Four years of post-COVID data have erased that hope. The 2022 bounce recovered 711 of the 8,259 students lost. Annual losses since then have returned to the pace of 2013 and 2014. The moderation is gone, and so are the students.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.