School choice advocates: Mandate open enrollment in all districts
About 80% of Ohio’s public school districts allow kids from outside their borders to fill their open seats.
It’s called open enrollment, and the schools that don’t allow it are mostly affluent suburban districts that surround the state’s eight largest cities.
“I live between Dublin, Worthington and Upper Arlington,” said Donita Brittman, a Columbus mom who sends her son to Clintonville Academy using an Edchoice scholarship. “I would consider sending my son to one of these schools.”
The districts say they don’t have room for more students, and they’d lose money by accepting them.
“We would have to tax our constituents to additionally educate other students from other districts, and that will never fly,” Dublin City School Board President Lynn May said. “We would never deny anyone who moves in, but it’s a capacity issue for us.”
But Brittman sometimes wonders if there are other reasons.
Maybe the parents don’t want kids coming from outside the district. Maybe the schools are worried about test scores. Or maybe they see a single, African American
parent and make assumptions about her family without knowing the full picture.
School choice advocates agree with Brittman. And that’s why they want to mandate open enrollment across Ohio.
“If people want to see systematic racism at work look at the map of districts that do and don’t allow it,” Center for
Christian Virtue President Aaron Baer said. “It is the most racist policy in Ohio, and it is perpetuated by the public school system.”
A proposal for statewide open enrollment
School choice advocates have wanted public schools to accept kids who don’t live in district since Ohio started open enrollment in 1989.
The Buckeye Institute, a conservative think tank, has been working with Baer and Chad Aldis, vice president for Ohio policy at the Fordham Insititute, to craft a bill that would do just that.
The idea is to model legislation from the rules Ohio’s open enrollment districts already use. For example, schools could say no to kids if their classrooms are nearly full. They could turn away students with significant disciplinary issues such as a string of suspensions or expulsion.
And they couldn’t cherry-pick the best athletes, artists and musicians. Schools would have to give away their extra spots on a first-come, first-served basis or through a lottery. Though there could be exceptions for returning students and their younger siblings.
“I think it’s a great idea that we have a bill, that we have hearings ...,” Senate President Matt Huffman, R-lima, said. “But I think there will be a major backlash.”
The districts that don’t allow open enrollment are some of the wealthiest schools in the state, Huffman said.
“I think the lobbying effort would be so intense. People who have bought their house in say, Olentangy, bought the house so their kid could go there,” he said. “They don’t want a bunch of other kids going there. Plain and simple.”
‘Doughnuts’ around urban districts
If an open enrollment bill has a chance in Columbus, Huffman said supporters will need to rely on their data.
The Fordham Institute paid a University of Oklahoma professor who specializes in education policy to study Ohio’s open enrollment numbers.
The main takeaway, professor Deven Carlson said, was open enrollment doesn’t “meaningfully change segregation levels either racial or socioeconomic.”
Part of that is the number of students who participate in the program (about 85,000 of Ohio’s 1.65 million public schools students). But the other part is that the districts surrounding the schools where the majority of Ohio’s Black students live don’t allow open enrollment.
The pattern on the map is “striking,” Carlson said. “They’re effectively shutting off a means by which this program might integrate students across racial or socioeconomic lines.”
Aldis described the rings around Ohio’s biggest districts as doughnuts. Columbus, for example, is almost entirely surrounded by districts that won’t accept transfers.
“I hate seeing these doors closed to kids,” Aldis said. “It’s so infuriating. It’s so clear, and we’re all too polite to say so because you don’t throw around things like that.”
More than just an empty seat
Suburban school districts and their supporters say the map doesn’t tell the whole story.
Students who open enroll into another district bring their state dollars with them but not their local property taxes.
“The share coming from the state was never meant to cover the entire cost of educating a child,” said Tony Podojil with the Alliance for High Quality Education. “Where is that additional money coming from?”
Districts like Olentangy, Dublin and Upper Arlington get most of their funding from local property taxes. And they’re growing fast. Dublin has students taking classes in trailers, and its schools range from 73% to 131% full.
Even staunch supporters of school choice like Sen. Andrew Brenner, R-delaware, agreed that capacity is a real issue for some of these suburban districts.
The Olentangy district, which Brenner represents, is building a new school almost every year just to keep up with the number of people moving in.
But he thinks there are “other districts that may be concerned about student performance and how open enrollment might impact their performance.”
Making the numbers work
State Auditor Dave Yost analyzed four northeast Ohio school districts that had open enrollment policies in 2016 and found a mixed bag of results.
Hubbard Exempted Village School District northeast of Youngstown added more than $1 million to its budget through open enrollment. But Coventry Local
School District near Akron had a $1 million net loss.
“If you have open seats in the fifthgrade class, it costs you nothing to fill those seats with kids from other schools because you are already paying the teacher; you’re already paying the heat bill,” Yost said during a press conference at the time.
But there’s a point at which more kids means hiring more teachers or creating more classrooms. That costs more money.
Coventry decreased its open enrollment spots for the 2018-2019 school year, and then Superintendent Lisa Blough told The Canton Repository she believed “at times, we did take more than we should have.”
And that’s the tricky part, Podojil said. A seat that exists today might not be there next year or in three years when another 200 homes are built.
“What happens if I need that seat back,” Podojil said. “Do I send a kid back to Delaware schools after a year or two?”
The Edchoice alternative
The workaround for students who want to get out of the public school system in places like Akron, Columbus and Cincinnati has largely been to find a charter school or take an Ed voucher for private school.
“The Edchoice scholarship is the more politically viable alternative,” Huffman said. “In fact, the lack of open enrollment is part of the justification for expanding Edchoice. The kids don’t have any other choice.”
That’s what Jennifer Roberts did. She’s the mother of a daughter on the autism spectrum who struggled for years with the faculty at West Carrollton City Schools.
Roberts’ daughter is high functioning, but sometimes she gets overwhelmed. She said the school would let her roam the halls to calm down. And if that didn’t work, they would tell Roberts to come pick her up.
“I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been on the phone or down in the principal’s office ready to scream,” Roberts said.
She even considered selling her house to get out of the district. But then she heard about Ohio’s voucher program and got her daughter into Chaminade Julienne Catholic High School in Dayton.
It’s been a night and day difference, Roberts said. She finally feels like her daughter is in the right place with the right support system for her to thrive.
“I looked at open enrollment, but there are no other districts near us that offer it,” Roberts said. “There are plenty of other schools in the area I would have taken a look at if they were an option.”
The bigger issue
Rep. Phil Robinson, D-solon, isn’t opposed to mandating open enrollment, but the bigger issue for him is why families are so desperate to get out of these public school districts in the first place.
“The groups who are pushing for open enrollment, I would want those same folks to be passionate about school funding,” Robinson said.
Public education isn’t for every kid, but he thinks a lot of the students who take Edchoice scholarships or open enrollment transfers might stay if Ohio improved their local school.
“Ohio’s promise of a better life begins in the classroom,” Robinson said. “We have real inequities in our system. Shuffling kids between school districts doesn’t solve the problem.”
Anna Staver and Grace Deng are reporters