Enrollment in the city’s public schools and its six in-district charter schools declined again this year, according to state numbers released late last week. Other charter schools saw an increase while parochial schools seemed to receive major outflows of Boston students.

State numbers from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) pegged Boston Public Schools (BPS) overall enrollment as of Oct. 1 at 46,001, down 168 students from last year, and 9,026 from 10 years ago. The numbers at the district’s charter schools – Boston Day and Evening Academy, Green Academy, Dudley Street Charter, Edward M. Kennedy Academy, UP Boston Middle School, and UP Dorchester Pre-K-8 – added up to 2,267 students, a drop of 438 students since the 2019-20 school year.

“Our goal is to create a district where all families and students feel excited and confident to enroll in BPS and stay here,” said Supt. Mary Skipper this week in a statement to the Reporter. “Black and Brown students make up a vast majority of our students and we, as a district, need to do everything possible to ensure that we are fully supporting them. …While it is true that the Black population is declining, as is our enrollment rate, that does not change our core focus.”

The losses in the BPS system’s public and charter schools have been a gain for area and regional parochial schools. Braintree’s 700-student student, grades 7 to12 Archbishop Williams High School (AWHS) has broadened its reach into Dorchester and Mattapan, with its leaders noting that more parents turned to them when they stayed open in the pandemic.

“We’re surrounded by great public-school districts,” said Dennis Duggan, president of Archbishop Williams. “But they were not able to handle the pandemic the way we were. The good news is the students who came here stayed with us and I think that good news has spread throughout Dorchester and Mattapan. We have a bus that comes from Dorchester, with a second one added this year.”

Duggan said that Williams was online-only from May to June 2020, but then spent more than $1 million to prepare for in-person classes by September of that year. That led to more and more parents from Dorchester and Mattapan choosing the school over online public schooling.

The same telling came from St. Brendan’s Pre-K-6 Catholic School in Neponset, where enrollments have been are steady and strong, said Maura Burke, its principal. “We got about 20 new students during the heart of the pandemic because we were open,” she said. “Only one of them has left and everyone else has stayed. I think it was a silver lining to the horror of the pandemic because we were open from September 2020 while BPS was remote. We now have a waiting list for our early childhood program, and we’re doing great.”

Other outflows include the METCO program, which partners with more than 30 suburban school districts for placement of Boston students. While no recent data were posted on the program’s website, enrollment figures for 2019-20 indicated that 3,205 Boston students had been placed in 33 suburban districts.

Evidence for the popularity of both options can be found early in the morning in parking lots around Dorchester – including the Florian Hall lot where the Archbishop Williams buses leave from and the Franklin Park Zoo parking lot where scores of buses leave at the break of dawn for suburban districts in the METCO program.

“It is a huge sacrifice to send kids to a school like Archbishop Williams, widely called “Archie’s,” and it’s on the lower end of the cost spectrum,” said Dorchester parent Carol Gracia, who has two kids on campus there. She said that she and her husband, Ed, did not make the decisions lightly.

Their son had been at Boston Collegiate Charter School in Dorchester, but the online schooling there during the pandemic wasn’t for him, she said, so “we pulled [him out] and had him repeat ninth grade at Archie’s,” she said. “We had never been through anything like the pandemic, and he had essentially missed a year of school and we didn’t know how it would affect him or others.”

Meanwhile, their daughter and her friends who were attending St. Brendan’s School had their sights set on the BPS exam schools. But the entrance requirements changed, and a new point system designed to increase diversity in the exam schools gave parochial students no extra points, in most cases, Gracia said, making it impossible to gain entry.

“We didn’t even apply her to exam school,” said Gracia. “She just went out with her entire class to Archie’s…With the parochial students getting zero extra points, that factored into a lot of decisions at St. Brendan’s.”

Their third child attends the Henderson School, a BPS full-inclusion school in Dorchester, and she said that has been an up-and-down experience. Gracia said things have improved this year after a difficult 2021.

Other non-BPS charter school options in Boston are on the west side of Dorchester and in Mattapan. State enrollment data, though, showed that several of those charter schools also declined in enrollment this year. They included Match Charter (down 39 students) and Roxbury Prep Charter (down 226 students), though other places, like the Edward Brooke Charter in Mattapan and Neighborhood House Charter School (NHCS) in Dorchester grew due to expansions into high school grades.

The Brooke Charter has gone from barely existing 10 years ago to hitting its maximum allowed enrollment this year at 2,223 students, with long waiting lists for entry. Charter schools are limited in their enrollment by state regulation.

Jon Clark, co-director of Brooke Charter, said the growth has really been about an expansion for their high school on American Legion Highway. They have also had enhanced enrollment in their middle school grades, but he said they believe they are done growing. That said, the school still has waiting lists and parents hoping for seats.

“I think families everywhere want really good schools for their kids,” he said. “From parent surveys, we know they want kids to be physically and emotionally safe and want them to advance and learn at a high level.”

Schools like Boston Collegiate have stayed relatively stable, at around 700 students. But the non-BPS charter schools in Boston appear to have absorbed a good deal of the Dorchester and Mattapan student population over the last 10 years. In the interim, The Brooke opened a high school and a middle school in Mattapan, Codman Academy Charter expanded from 9-12 to a K-12, Boston Prep Charter nearly doubled enrollment to almost 700 students, and Boston Collegiate increased by more than 100 students over the decade.

The story is more complex, of course, than just students and families choosing different school options. Part of the equation is an overall decline of children living in the city, as is evidenced from Census 2020 data. The Reporter previously analyzed Census data and found the youth population steadily declined from 1970, when young people made up 41 percent of the neighborhood population, to 2020, when they made up 22 percent – a difference of almost 32,000 young people. Dorchester is a neighborhood with a large youth population in the city which has others, like South Boston, with just 11 percent.

All of which is part of a nationwide trend of families having fewer children in urban centers. BPS officials point especially to the citywide loss of Black children in the under 18 Black population in Boston. The system puts the number at 16,433.