On October 1, Brookline's eight K-8 schools enrolled 4,436 students. Even with every class kept three students below the School Committee's class-size guidelines, the sections running today have room for about 440 more, and every school has open seats. Filled to the guidelines, they would have room for about 1,100. The map below shows where those seats are, by school district and by buffer zone, the areas whose children can be assigned to either of two or more schools.
Any count of open seats depends on two choices: what counts as a classroom, and how many students fit in one. The buttons on the map switch between today's sections, which can be filled without a new classroom or teacher, and each building's general classrooms, which may need more teachers. They also switch between the guideline and 1, 2 or 3 students under it, since the guideline is a ceiling: in 2017, when the schools held about 1,000 more K-8 students than today, classes averaged 21, and the School Department called an average of 24 the outcome to avoid. Click a district to see its open seats grade by grade, since a school can have room overall and still have a full grade.
The map marks 26 Pleasant St., the 96-home rental building proposed under Warrant Article 15. It sits in the buffer zone between Florida Ruffin Ridley and Lawrence, which together have about 115 open seats in today's sections at three below the guidelines, and about 305 at the guidelines. Recent Brookline buildings with a similar mix of homes point to about 12 to 22 students from it, across all grades.
Brookline High School serves the whole town, so it isn't mapped. It had 2,165 students on October 1 against a design capacity of about 2,700 after its 2022 expansion.
Classrooms per school. The building measure rests on a count of each school's general classrooms. For the five older buildings, the count is ours, read from the room labels on the floor plans the principals supplied in December 2025: homerooms, plus grade 6-8 subject rooms where the middle grades rotate. Rooms used for special education, English learners, specialists, art, music and world languages are not counted. If you have better information, such as the School Department's list of rooms and how many students each can hold, please send it and the map will be updated.
| School | General classrooms | Sections, Oct. 1, 2026 | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baker | 35 | 34 | Floor plans: 35 grade homerooms |
| Driscoll | 36 | 29 | Design of the new building: 4 sections a grade |
| Hayes | 21 | 20 | Floor plans: 12 K-5 homerooms and 9 grade 6-8 subject rooms |
| Lawrence | 32 | 31 | Floor plans: 22 K-5 homerooms and 10 grade 6-8 subject rooms |
| Lincoln | 27 | 25 | Floor plans: 18 K-5 homerooms and 9 grade 6-8 subject rooms |
| Pierce | 36 | 31 | New building, opening fall 2028: 4 sections a grade times 9 grades (no published classroom count) |
| Ridley | 45 | 41 | Design of the rebuilt school: 5 sections a grade |
| Runkle | 26 | 25 | Floor plans: 17 K-5 homerooms and 9 grade 6-8 subject rooms |
| Total | 258 | 236 |
Sources.
- Enrollment and average class size by school and grade: the School Department's PSB Enrollment Report, School Committee meeting of October 28, 2026, slides 4 and 5 (October 1 counts; sections are students divided by average class size). Class-size guidelines: Superintendent's Report, September 16, 2026, last two pages.
- Driscoll's guideline of 24 in grades 3-8: the Advisory Committee's FY2027 schools write-up, note 8.
- Floor plans of Baker, Hayes, Lawrence, Lincoln and Runkle: Expenditures and Revenues Study Committee, Schools Subcommittee, meeting packet of December 1, 2025, pp. 8-43 (minutes).
- Driscoll: Schematic Design Report, May 2019, a four-section school; the project page gives 36 classrooms.
- Ridley (then the Devotion School): the Massachusetts School Building Authority's project memo, November 2014, design enrollment 1,010 in K-8; five sections from the School Department's internal facility assessment (archived copy), which gives 1,050 students including pre-K.
- Pierce: the project page, "4-sections per grade plus 3 BEEP classrooms"; the Massachusetts School Building Authority's project memo, February 2022, design enrollment 725 in K-8.
- School districts and buffer zones: the Town's core school districts and districts and buffer zones maps, August 2026, from its Schools page. The buffer zones on this map were traced from the PDF, so they are accurate to tens of meters, not to the address.
- Class sizes in 2015-16 and the projection for 2020-21: the School Department's 9th school kickoff presentation of January 9, 2017, p. 14 (archived copy).
- High school: the architects' stated capacity after the 2022 expansion, about 2,700; the School Department has not published one.