The COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by a wave of kids being pulled out of Newton’s public schools and sent to private schools.

The district—which conducts a school census every year for every student in public and private school, as per state law—wants to know why they left and whether or not those families would consider returning to NPS. So, members of the NPS community were invited to respond to a survey and engage in an interactive AI-driven interview with a program called ThoughtExchange. The survey had more than 200 respondents, but only 13 people engaged with ThoughtExchange.

Superintendent Anna Nolin’s team also interviewed parents whose older kids were in NPS and their younger kids are in private school.

And the team conducted two focus groups with Jewish parents (mostly Orthodox) and Palestinian parents.

“There are not a lot of surprises here, either to you or to me, from the kind of entry plan feedback when I got here, or that you shared with me as School Committee members in my meetings with you when we started together,” Nolin said.

Dr. Katie Hoge presented the results at Monday’s School Committee meeting.

Here are a few highlights from the results, which you can read online.

Shrinking population

The total number of school-aged kids (kids in public or private school or homeschooling) living in Newton has declined by 171 students since last year, a drop of 1.2 percent. And that follows a trend.

“We started seeing a decline in this population in the 2018-2019 school year,” Hoge said.

The past several years of housing price increases have had younger families with school-aged kids looking elsewhere to set down roots, causing the city’s population to get older and older.

Another trend seen since the pandemic has been a movement of kids from public to private schools, as concerns over safety and learning loss had families reevaluating their kids; education.

But that trend seems to be reversing. Of the Newton school-aged population this year, 21.7 percent go to private schools. That’s down slightly from 21.9 percent.

The percentage is still higher than it was before the pandemic, Hoge noted.

Among elementary and middle schools, the percentage of non-public school students decreased, while the percentage of non-public high school students increased.

Before the pandemic, the percentage of kids not in public school would go down in the high schools as many kids would to to private school for elementary and middle school and then public high school. That’s reversed since the pandemic, with more students opting for private high school after going through public elementary and middle school.

Where are they going? Mostly outside the city. About a quarter of the private school students living in Newton go to private schools in Newton. The rest go to other private schools in Massachusetts outside of Newton.

“And of all non-public enrollment, 26 percent of students are enrolled in schools that have a religious affiliation, which is consistent with patterns that we’ve seen in recent years,” Hoge said.

The conversations

Nolin said families gave multiple layers of reasoning for why they pulled their kids out of NPS and won’t send them back to NPS. Many said there was lack of predictability during the COVID-19 pandemic and now their children are doing well so they don’t want to move them again. That’s especially true for high school students.

“I also have to say, obviously people who left the Newton Public Schools were not thinking we were not thinking we were their best choice at that time,” Nolin said. “One of the questions that I asked and the automated interview asked was, ‘Is there anything e can do  bring you back?’ And they were like,’ Oh no. That shop has sailed.’ So there was a significant enough decision for them that I wouldn’t expect us to be able to rectify that.”

Safety and sports

While COVID-19 played a major part in many people removing their kids from NPS, Nolin said that an uptick in families sending kids to religious private schools was seen after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israeli civilians that was followed by months of hate crime activity in America, including Newton.

That concern was especially clear with Ward Elementary School parents when Nolin visited that school.

And sometimes the grass looks greener elsewhere because the grass has better sports teams playing on it. Nolin mentioned that she had spoken with three families who had pulled their kids out of NPS to send them to schools with more robust athletics programs or to religious schools offering sports scholarships.

Hoge said athletics is often a reason given for leaving in addition to other reasons, something Ward 4 committee member Tamika Olszewski said she’s heard anecdotally over the years.

“In my tenure as a parent with NPS, many of the families I know who have left the district while actively being high school students have done so for athletic reasons,” Olszewski said. “One of the benefits of having such wonderful student athletes is that others are recognizing those talents as well, and students do have scholarships and the like elsewhere.”

Quirky AI

“The online interview is not perfect,” Nolin cautioned.

Like many AI programs, ThoughtExchange had some issues in its execution. Specifically, it was a little judgy about parents’ responses.

One parent contacted the School Committee upset that the AI program had scolded them for “being too colorful with their language,” Nolin mentioned. The program asked the parent to respond “in a less angry way,” which upset the parent even more. And there were other similar instances reported.

“I reported that to the software developers and kind of kidded them for their AI not being able to listen to tough feedback,” Nolin said.

You can watch the entire meeting and discussion on NewTV’s YouTube channel.