“Today is my last day,” Michaud Ngido recalled the student telling her in mid-December before ultimately returning to Mexico.
Michaud Ngido, a teacher at Mariner Middle School in Milton, part of the Cape Henlopen School District, had already lost one of her students to self-deportation over the summer. Now she had to bid farewell to another.
“I was really sad,” Michaud Ngido said.
And her experience is not unique.
Delaware teachers and administrators said they have seen a rise in the number of families choosing to self-deport this year – choosing to leave the country together rather than face the possibility of being separated by federal agents as immigration enforcement ramps up across the country.
Multilingual learners, or students who are developing proficiency in multiple languages, are oftentimes immigrants who are learning English for the first time. Their citizenship status varies widely.
In some cases, the children are American citizens, having been born here, but whose parents may be undocumented. In other cases, both the parents and children may be undocumented and seeking asylum, or they may be resettled here through refugee or humanitarian programs, such as Temporary Protected Status.
But the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies may have contributed to a significant decline in the number of multilingual learner (MLL) students in Delaware schools, experts say. The fear of federal agents separating their family has led many parents to keep their children home from school, with others deciding to leave the country altogether.
Nearly 70% of traditional Delaware school districts — 11 out of 16 — saw a decline in the number of enrolled multilingual learner students in the 2025-2026 school year compared to the previous year, according to a Spotlight Delaware analysis.
The enrollment drop in Delaware schools could be attributed to a confluence of factors, including self-deportations, alternatives to in-person learning and students cycling out of the MLL program with no new arrivals to backfill their spots as a result of the Trump administration’s border policies, said Julie Sugarman, associate director for K-12 education research with the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan immigration think tank.
While the MLL enrollment dropoff was felt across Delaware’s three counties, the First State is not alone in experiencing the decline.
In the weeks after federal agents killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, classrooms emptied as even U.S. citizens elected to keep their children home from school. In California, a Stanford University study found a 22% jump in student absences in state school districts facing intensified immigration enforcement.
Exploring Delaware’s MLL Landscape
At Cape Henlopen School District, LouAnn Hudson, the district’s assistant superintendent, said she saw an increase in families self-deporting in December. Families and students would often notify school officials of their decision, and it was uncommon for families to leave without saying anything, Hudson said.
Cape Henlopen saw a decrease of nearly 10% in MLL enrollment, with the number of students dropping from 670 in 2024 to 605 in 2025. The district has rolling enrollment throughout the school year, and there just were not as many new MLL students enrolling this year, according to Hudson.
“Our kids are struggling,” she said.
More than half the students who left the program moved to schools in different states, while others left to other Delaware school districts, Hudson added.
In July 2024, Michaud Ngido filed a civil rights complaint against Cape Henlopen School District, alleging discrimination against multilingual learners and their families. Michaud Ngido alleged that Mariner Middle School failed to sufficiently staff and support the language assistance program for MLL students.
The complaint, which was lodged with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, has since stalled despite being filed nearly two years ago, Michaud Ngido said.
In 2025, Indian River and Red Clay school districts recorded their lowest MLL enrollment numbers in four years. Christina, Colonial, Delmar, Woodbridge and Cape Henlopen school districts all experienced the lowest enrollment numbers since the 2022 school year.
Spotlight Delaware conducted its data analysis after submitting a Freedom of Information Act request for MLL enrollment numbers from 2021 to 2025 with Delaware’s 19 school districts and two dual-language charter schools in December.
Brandywine School District did not have 2025 data available.
Two of Delaware’s dual-language immersion charter schools — Las Americas ASPIRA Academy and Academia Antonia Alonso Charter School — also saw decreased enrollment numbers. Antonia Alonso saw a decrease of more than 4% while ASPIRA experienced a nearly 3% drop in enrollment in 2025.
Impacts on School Funding?
This MLL enrollment decline also could lead to funding consequences for schools and long-term learning loss for students whose education has been interrupted, experts say.
Delaware’s public education funding formula is currently based on a unit count system, which distributes money to districts based on the number of students enrolled. The state also has an Opportunity Funding program, which provides weighted funding for low-income and MLL students.
Some school districts have aimed to use those opportunity funds to hire MLL teachers or instructional paraprofessionals to work with those learning English, according to program applications.
Delaware’s unit count is a snapshot of student enrollment, which typically takes place within the last 10 days of September.
Some school districts may already be seeing the effects of decreased student enrollment.
Officials noted a lower unit count than originally expected during a December 2025 Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council meeting.
Brian Maxwell, the director of the state’s Office of Management and Budget, said during the meeting that the count produced just 65 additional units for school districts. The state had projected an increase of 225.
“I believe some of it is attributed to multi-language learners,” Maxwell said during the meeting. “Obviously, there has been a number of students that may not be showing up to class just because of the enforcement of ICE, and so some of the families may be scared to actually send their kids to school.”
This school year’s unit count showed an increase in both home and private school enrollment, said Nicholas Konzelman, the director of policy and external affairs at the Office of Management and Budget.
There was also a “small decrease” in MLL enrollment, Konzelman wrote in a statement to Spotlight Delaware.
The decrease, along with increased enrollment in home and private schools, resulted in a lower overall enrollment in Delaware’s public schools, Konzelman said in his statement.
Gary Henry, a professor at the University of Delaware’s School of Education and Joseph R. Biden Jr. School of Public Policy & Administration, said lower enrollment could put some school districts in low-income areas in a “downward spiral.”
Henry said when districts in Kent or Sussex County lose students who typically bring in additional dollars, it “contributes to that downward spiral of effects on the schools that are serving more of [MLL and low-income] students and their families.”
Higher-wealth districts are able to generate more funding despite losing students, Henry said.
Henry also noted there could be a lag in funding if students come back to their school district after the unit count, as they will not be added to the count.
“There’s not an opportunity to go back and say, ‘OK, these kids have come into class,’” Henry said. “So, you’re stuck for a full school year without the resources from the opportunity funds for those students.”
Some teachers have already felt the impacts of a lack of funding for their existing MLL students.
For years, Alena Warner-Chisolm, a teacher in the Red Clay Consolidated School District, has made sure all of her materials are available in both English and Spanish for her MLL students. She has even paid for tutoring sessions so she can hold conversations with parents in Spanish.
Warner-Chisolm called it “exhausting work,” but said that for years her eighth-grade students have had the most growth out of all other eighth graders in their building.
“My kids, I gave them so much support that they were able to write five-paragraph, college-level essays,” she said. “They’re able to literally do everything.”
Still, Warner-Chisolm noted that there needs to be more funding for MLL students.
The state’s Public Education Funding Commission, which is in charge of recommending how future dollars should be distributed to Delaware schools, is moving forward with recommending a hybrid funding formula.
If implemented, that formula would combine the state’s distribution of money on a per-student basis with one that allocates dollars based on student needs.
This year’s drop in MLL students is one of the first repercussions that Delaware schools have felt as a result of increased immigration enforcement under the Trump administration.
It remains unclear if Louise Michaud Ngido will see more students leave her Milton classroom, or how enrollment trends will change in the coming years.
Despite not knowing how many students may leave before the end of the school year, teachers like Michaud Ngido and Warner-Chisolm are still committed to teaching their students. They know that without sufficient funding or dedicated teachers, their students will be left behind.
“I have countless examples of work where sometimes [MLL students] even outperformed the [non-MLL students], and that was because of their work ethic — these kids worked,” Warner-Chisolm said.
This story first appeared in Spotlight Delaware. Read the original here.
