Douglas County schools have always accepted students from other districts, and Kansas recently implemented open enrollment statewide to allow families to transfer their children from schools that don’t meet their needs. Despite this, public school enrollment is still declining.
The new, controversial statewide open enrollment law – or Kansas school district choice law – was passed in 2022 and allows students in Kansas to attend schools outside their district of residence as long as there are seats available.
For supporters of the law, it is a way for families to send their children away from local schools that do not meet their needs. This reflects a trend seen in more than twenty other states where transferring between public schools is considered a fundamental element of school choice. In contrast, there are several public school leaders who oppose open enrollment, arguing that it exacerbates the already difficult process of predicting student numbers and ensuring there are enough teachers and classrooms to meet demand.
School districts throughout Douglas County have reported to the Journal-World their acceptance numbers of students from outside the district for the 2024-2025 school year. The Lawrence School District has accepted 58 transfer requests from nonresidents; Baldwin City has accepted nine students; and the Perry-Lecompton district had the highest number, with 188 students. The Eudora School District was unable to provide the number of students enrolled from outside the district at the time of this article’s publication.
Josh Woodward, superintendent of the Perry-Lecompton School District, noted an increase in the number of students transferring from other districts, but he was unsure if that increase was due to the new open enrollment legislation or if it simply reflected the typical fluctuations in student numbers in their district.
“When those requests for non-residential children came in on June 1, they were pretty evenly spread across all grade levels,” Woodward said. “There was no particular grade level that had a lot more children than another.”
Mark Dodge, superintendent of the Baldwin City School District, noted that the change in the application period for families this year may have impacted enrollment from out-of-district families.
“The only thing it has done, and I think is detrimental to families, is it has narrowed that window until the month of June,” Dodge said. “We used to accept students for the rest of the school year.”
“However, since this is the first year we are going through this process, we have decided not to accept non-residents outside of this period,” Dodge said.
Photo by: Contribution
Perry-Lecompton-Gymnasium
Overall, according to Stu Moeckel, superintendent of Eudora Public Schools, it is too early to say whether the new legislation will have a major impact on her school district.
Although all Douglas County school districts said they do not monitor the reasons parents leave their district and move to other districts, Woodward said his district does track the reasons parents want to enroll their children there.
He said they saw an increase in enrollment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and many parents were interested in enrolling their children in a smaller or rural school district – Woodward said it was a priority for the school district to maintain those smaller class sizes. Woodward also suggested that parents may simply not have been aware of the options to explore other school districts.
School districts will continue to receive state base grants for each student from another district enrolled starting Sept. 20. Typically, school districts do not accept students after that date because state base grants are no longer available for their enrollment, Woodward said.
As the Journal-World reported, the Lawrence school district completed its annual enrollment count last year and found a drop of 299 students from the previous year. That drop in just one year is the same as the number a consultant had projected over a five-year period. The audited enrollment number for 2022 was 10,957, while the preliminary, unaudited number for 2023 was 10,658.
Lawrence district spokeswoman Julie Boyle said in an email that public school enrollment has declined nationwide. Birth rates have fallen across the U.S., including in Douglas County. For example, she said the district will have 944 high school graduates graduating in May 2023 and only 674 children enrolled in kindergarten the following fall.
“Our enrollment numbers were flat or declining prior to COVID-19 and dropped significantly during the pandemic,” Boyle said in an emailed response. “For safety reasons, some families chose to delay their children’s start of school or homeschool their children, or they chose other school options due to school safety protocols, such as mask/quarantine requirements, and educational models, such as distance learning and hybrid distance/in-person instruction.”
Despite the declining enrollment numbers, school districts said they are actively looking for strategies to increase enrollment numbers and attract more families. Dodge said the Baldwin City School District is always looking for ways to keep enrollment numbers steady and attract more students.
“We try to make sure our programs meet the interests of our children and we try to provide a balanced and comprehensive education that includes academics, arts, athletics and mentoring of our students,” Dodge said.
