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