2023-12-25 16:10:30
Every Kansas school district must implement by the end of the year some form of an open enrollment policy, which allows students to attend public schools outside of their geographical boundaries.
Open enrollment was part of House Bill 2567 from the 2022 legislative session. Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly signed the law, which also fully funded K-12 schools, despite objections from some Democrats on open enrollment.
Many school districts across the state are just now finalizing their open enrollment policies after learning what they’re legally allowed to do.
“There have been organization that have been able to push some information out to help our school boards identify what they need, and what they have to put in place in terms of policy and what those variations can look like,” said G.A. Buie, executive director of United School Administrators of Kansas.
Open enrollment policy can be tricky for larger school districts
Buie said he appreciates the level of local control districts are given under state law. There has, however, been some confusion about how districts assess how many available seats are available in the district.
School districts will still be obligated to provide spots to students who move within their borders, and the unpredictability of migration creates a moving target that schools aren’t able to precisely gauge. Districts must account for their space by looking at the availability by the specific school and grade.
“For a small school district that’s not a huge deal. But for a larger district, Wichita, for example, has 86 school buildings and they have to go through and look at every grade level in every single school building,” said Leah Fliter, assistant executive director of the Kansas Association of School Boards. “Frankly, it’s an administrative burden for some of the larger school districts.”
But how districts define how much room they have is flexible enough that schools can practice some of their own due diligence. Buie said it doesn’t seem like the law is going to drastically alter the attendance patterns at schools.
Part of that is likely because most schools already had some form of an open enrollment policy in place. The Kansas School Superintendent Association estimated about 93% of Kansas school districts had some form of open enrollment policies, with the main holdout being suburban districts that have little space for new students.
“What this law was really was designed to do was trying to go into a couple of the suburban areas across the state and force them to open their boundaries a little bit more, which is not going to happen because they’re full,” Buie said.
The law also strips district ability to reject students from entering the district if they’re not in good standing with the school they’re transferring from.
“In the past, most districts had a policy that they had to be in good standing from the district they were leaving. That was not included in the legislation so districts could be forced to take a student that’s not in good standing,” Buie said. “That is not sitting well with many of our boards of education.”
The case for school choice in Kansas
School choice advocates cast doubt on the negative impacts of the open enrollment policies. Elizabeth Patton, the statewide director for Americans for Prosperity, said districts’ open enrollment policies were more restrictive than opponents of a statewide open enrollment let on.
“Why are they so upset if most districts were doing it anyway,” Patton said. “From the data we were looking at, that’s not actually true.
Patton believes mandatory open enrollment empowers parents and families more options and flexibility within the public school system. School choice advocates say they support any type of policies that allow more flexibility in the schools that children attend.
“Using district lines to determine where a child goes to school, in our view, is basically a 200-year-old mistake that has actually resulted in a lot of racial and socioeconomic segregation in U.S. public schools,” said Elizabeth Patton, the director of Americans for Prosperity in Kansas. “Our position is that every single child in America, regardless of zip code or circumstance, should have the same opportunities to pursue education.”
Vouchers typically return the per-pupil funding a state provides to public schools that can be redeemed at a private school. Education savings account similarly distribute per-pupil funding to accounts controlled by parents that can be spent at either private schools or in home schooling.
Tuition tax credits offer tax incentives for individuals or corporations that pay tuition, rather than distributing already collected tax dollars.
Do open enrollment policies work?
Advocacy groups on both sides of school choice programs claim studies show either harms or benefits of school choice. Brookings Institute, a liberal think tank, found that school choice increases racial disparities in academic achievement.
The CATO Institute, a Libertarian think-tank, said a meta-analysis of school choice programs that include tuition assistance for private schools show a positive effect for students. The National Institute of Health found mixed results that supports open enrollment in public schools but not for private schools.
“We find that more choice of regular public schools in the elementary and middle school years is associated with a lower likelihood that students will be severely disengaged in eighth grade, and more choices of public schools of choice has a similar effect but only in urban areas,” the NIH reported. “In contrast, more private sector choice does not have such a general beneficial effect.”
Buie said there isn’t an achievement gap between students in private and public schools in Kansas once students’ backgrounds are accounted for.
“When you start looking at similarities of students’ and parents’ backgrounds, the data comes out very similar. If students are high risk, in most cases, maybe not all, they’re going to score a little bit lower whether it’s public or private,” Buie said. If they’re a little more affluent, more college education from the parents, in most cases those students are going to score higher whether it’s private or public.”
But some school choice advocates say the accountability for student success should be the responsibility of the parents rather than the state.
“We would say we would leave it up to (the parents), if they’re satisfied with a private school or micro school or whatever it might be. So ultimate accountability would fall on the parent,” said Joey Magaña, vice president of policy and advocacy for Ed Choice, an organization that advocates for expanded school choice policies.
What will the Kansas Legislature do on school choice?
Senate President Ty Masterson told The Capital Journal that he’s planning to introduce legislation on school choice. Whether the House and Senate can muster two-thirds of their respective chambers to override a governor’s veto is a different matter.
“We still would like to do something to empower parents on school choice,” Masterson said. “Not sure that we can get over a veto on that.”
Kelly has repeatedly opposed using tax dollars to support private schools or home schooling. A scaled-back school choice bill died during the last session after a governor veto and opposition from rural Republicans in districts that don’t have many options for private or charter schools.
“I do not believe in vouchers,” Kelly told reporters last year. “I believe that public dollars ought to go to public schools, and so it won’t work. What they need to do is pull the special education funding out of that bill and put it back in the regular budget bill.”
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