Kansas Schools Fought Open Enrollment but Now Need It To Stay Afloat

Superintendents warned open enrollment would overwhelm them. Instead, they have nearly 3,000 vacancies as parents and students have more choices.

Kansas launched its K-12 open enrollment program at the beginning of the 2024–25 school year, allowing students to transfer to public schools other than their residentially assigned ones. Before this reform, school districts had significant discretion over non-resident transfers, rejecting applicants even if space was available in their schools.

Kansas' reform isn't unusual—since 2020, nine states have strengthened their open enrollment laws so students can attend public schools other than their assigned ones when there are extra seats. Yet some public school officials in the state, such as the superintendent of Olathe Public Schools, opposed letting students who live outside their boundaries transfer to fill open seats.  

The irony now is that the same district that opposed better open enrollment laws could benefit significantly from non-resident transfers as it faces a $28 million budget deficit after losing almost 1,900 students since the pandemic.

Before it was signed into law in 2022, Kansas' open enrollment policy faced fierce opposition. Notably, two Kansas superintendents, Brent Yeager of Olathe Public Schools and Tonya Merrigan of Blue Valley Public Schools, testified that their "nationally competing" school districts would be overwhelmed by transfer requests.

But it turns out that this was grossly exaggerated. Instead of being overwhelmed by transfer requests, Olathe Public Schools only received 72 transfer requests for the 2024–25 school year, filling just over 10 percent of the district's 590 vacancies. The Olathe Reporter noted that the district excluded certain schools from transfer applicants due to anticipated growth and higher attendance rates.

Yet a new report estimated that Olathe Public Schools could have nearly 3,000 open seats—more than enough openings to accommodate the handful of transfers they received so far. This means that five times as many seats could be available during the next school year as the current one.

However, a high volume of transfer requests wasn't the superintendents' only concern. "Without intending to sound elitist," they added, "it is nonetheless true that housing costs in our districts often provide a check on resident student growth now." In other words, Olathe and Blue Valley didn't want to accommodate families who couldn't afford a $363,000 home, which is the average median home value in these districts.

Contrary to Merrigan's and Yeager's fears, strong open enrollment programs don't attract large shares of students overnight. For instance, just 2,464 students participated in Wisconsin's open enrollment program when it was launched in 1998—less than 1 percent of students statewide. In the intervening 26 years, participation has increased by about 14 percent annually, accounting for 8 percent of Wisconsin public school students during the 2023–24 school year.

Similarly, in West Virginia, only about 1,400 students, or 1 percent of public school students, transferred to schools in other districts when its program became operational in 2023.

Participation in Kansas' new open enrollment program isn't too different from Wisconsin and West Virginia's initial participation rates—just over 1,500 students and fewer than 1 percent of Kansas students enrolled in public schools. 

As the program scales up, however, Kansas school districts should start thinking about how to attract new students instead of how to keep them out. Like many state public school systems, Kansas's student count has dropped by 3 percent since the pandemic. 

In particular, the Kansas Department of Education reports that Olathe's and Blue Valley's student counts declined by 6 percent and 3 percent, respectively, during that time frame.  

These losses are due to an increasingly competitive education marketplace as families choose schooling options other than their residentially assigned public school and the effects of a birth dearth that began in 2007.

Some public schools are already experiencing growing pains in this new education landscape where students have greater agency in school selection. Nick LeRoy, whose organization, SchoolMint, specializes in rebuilding public schools' student enrollments, explained that traditional public schools resist the idea of having to "market their school," even though schools are now operating in an increasingly "free market sort of environment."

For example, some traditional public schools in Florida created "attractor programs," which give students hands-on experience with flight simulators, gardening, robotics, and 3D printing in order to retain and attract new students. School districts that fail to adapt, like Florida's, risk losing students. 

These competitive pressures will only increase as more states adopt strong open enrollment policies, like Kansas', which weaken the tie between housing and schooling. Currently, state policymakers in 12 states are considering proposals that would significantly strengthen their open enrollment laws.

To date, 16 states have codified strong open enrollment laws. In five of them—Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, West Virginia, and Wisconsin—nearly 686,000 students used open enrollment to attend schools that are the right fit, accounting for 14 percent of these states' public school enrollments. These data illustrate that traditional public schools can successfully operate in competitive education marketplaces without the sky falling. 

Instead of letting overblown fears stifle good policy, school district leaders should embrace open enrollment. Additionally, traditional public schools shouldn't be afraid of the same competitive pressures faced by private and charter schools where parents and students can vote with their feet.