Orange County Public Schools has more than 8,000 fewer students this October than it did a year ago.
District data shared with Central Florida Public Media shows students classified as immigrants account for more than half, with the largest drops among students from Venezuela and Haiti.
The number of students OCPS classifies as immigrants fell from 18,517 in October 2025 to 13,211 this October, a loss of more than 5,300 students.
That decline is part of a larger, two-year trend. In October 2024, OCPS had about 19,500 students classified as immigrants. By October 2026, that number had dropped by more than 6,300, while overall district enrollment fell by nearly 13,700 students.
Tracking students
OCPS tracks immigrant students under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.
The classification applies to students ages 3 to 21 who were born outside the United States, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico and have attended U.S. schools for no more than three full academic years.
The district said the data is collected for federal education reporting and does not indicate a student's current immigration status.
Country-of-origin data shows significant declines among students from Venezuela and Haiti.
The number of Venezuelan students classified as immigrants fell from 3,633 in the 2025-26 school year to 1,904 this school year, a drop of 1,729.
Venezuelan Temporary Protected Status status ended Oct. 2 of this year.
Haitian student numbers fell from 2,110 to 1,395 over the same period, a decrease of 715 students.
The district said it noticed a sharp decline in Haitian student enrollment this summer, around the time changes to Haitian TPS took effect. TPS is a federal program that allows eligible people from violence-torn countries to live and work in the United States temporarily.
Haiti's TPS designation was terminated by the Trump Administration effective July 27, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that the administration could proceed with ending the protections.
Other notable declines over the past two years include more than 500 fewer students from Brazil and nearly 400 fewer from Cuba.
The data shows these enrollment declines occurred amid major changes to immigration protections. However, it does not establish that TPS changes alone caused students to leave the district or indicate where those students went.
Families face uncertainty
Fabiola Gomez, president of Casa de Venezuela Orlando, a nonprofit supporting Venezuelan families and the broader Latino community, said she heard that some families have left the state or are turning to homeschooling.
“Nine million Venezuelans left the country, not because they wanted a vacation, people left Venezuela, fleeing a very, very difficult situation,” she said. “They already went through that change, thinking that they were coming to a safe place, and now the safe place they thought this was, is not.”
Gomez said it’s heartbreaking to see schools go from a safe place to a place of fear and the impact of these immigration changes goes beyond education alone.
“Not being able to go to school and then living in their homes under so much anxiety and not knowing what's next or what's going to happen to their parents or themselves,” she said. “I'm sure it’s going to have an impact on their mental health, in the way they see things, their future, and of course in their education too.”
As of now, the district’s data does not establish how many have graduated, left the country, moved to another district, switched to private school or homeschooling, or no longer qualify for the federal classification.
And Gomez said she expects the number of immigrant students leaving schools to keep going up.
