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Women in Connecticut are having fewer babies, and school enrollment numbers across the state are falling along with the fertility rate.

Connecticut’s fertility rate ranked 41st in 2023, among the lowest of all states and the District of Columbia. There has been a steady decrease in the number of babies born here since 2010.

The birth rate, or the number of births per 1,000 residents, has been declining for years, with the exception of a bump in 2021 — part of a national trend that many attribute to the pandemic.

School enrollment rates, not surprisingly, follow the trend.

Enrollment has fallen since at least 2006, when the state had 578,000 students enrolled. This school year there were 497,800 students enrolled — nearly a 14% drop from the 2006 numbers.

In Connecticut, there was an average of 50.2 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, according to 2023 CDC data. Fertility rates in Northeast, including Connecticut, are lower than most of the rest of the country. Preliminary numbers for 2025 show the U.S. fertility rate for 2025 is 53.1 births per 1,000 women, which is a decline from the year prior.

The impacts of birth rate on school enrollment can be seen in grade by grade enrollment, especially among the youngest cohorts of students. This year, there were large percentage decreases in enrollment for first and second graders. However, kindergarten saw the first percentage increase in enrollment since 2021.

School enrollment numbers have decreased markedly in Connecticut in the past two years. But not all of it is due to a decrease in the fertility rate — some of this has been attributed to the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

International migration, the largest sector of Connecticut’s population growth, fell 2025 compared to 2024.

And in schools, the number of multilingual learners, which was the only population increasing each year in Connecticut public schools, fell for the first time in decades this school year.

Sasha is a data reporting fellow with The Connecticut Mirror. She graduated from the University of Maryland in May with a degree in journalism and a minor in creative writing. For the past year Sasha was working part time for the Herald-Mail, a newspaper based in Western Maryland. She was also a reporter and copy editor for Capital News Service, the university’s wire service where she covered the state legislature, the Baltimore Key Bridge collapse, school board elections, youth mental health and climate change. Earlier in her college career, Sasha also interned at the Baltimore Magazine and wrote for numerous student publications including the Diamondback, the university’s independent, student-run newspaper.