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Open enrollment hurts some schools in funding

Bloomfield Elementary School students board the bus Friday in Trenton. The Edgewood school district is an open enrollment district.

Staff photo by Gary Stelzer Bloomfield Elementary School students board the bus Friday in Trenton. The Edgewood school district is an open enrollment district.

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Rachel Barrington picks up her daughter Grace from Ridgeway Elementary. Although they live in the Talawanda district, Barrington said that their lives are more Hamilton-centered, so going to Hamilton schools makes more sense for them.

staff photo Rachel Barrington picks up her daughter Grace from Ridgeway Elementary. Although they live in the Talawanda district, Barrington said that their lives are more Hamilton-centered, so going to Hamilton schools makes more sense for them.

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By Richard O Jones, Staff Writer Updated 10:36 PM Friday, January 6, 2012

BUTLER COUNTY — Ohio’s open enrollment policy allows students to take advantage of academic programs not offered at their home schools, but it’s also costly for districts.

Seven of Butler County’s 10 public school districts accept open enrollment students. Only Fairfield, Lakota and Ross schools do not.

“A district may have a certain academic program that a student wants to go to,” Ohio Department of Education spokesman Patrick Gallaway said. “There are cases where one district adopted a pay-to-play policy on sports so some students went to an adjacent district where they didn’t have to pay.”

But the downside for school districts is that a portion of their per-pupil state funding, presently $5,783, goes along with the student to a new district.

Open enrollment cost Hamilton schools $782,000 and Middletown schools more than $1.8 million in per-pupil funding for students who left for other districts this year.

Hamilton was able to recoup $730,000 of that funding with students who open enrolled in the district, but Middletown only gained a little more than $323,000 from the same policy.

Hamilton schools originally opted to not participate in open enrollment, said Treasurer Robert Hancock, but realized it needed to stop the one-way flow of money and so amended its policy five years ago.

“We can’t control the kids going out of the district,” he said, “so our decision was to counteract that. We do it as a way to extend our financial resources and to stay off the ballot without impacting our educational offerings.”

This year, Hamilton has off-set the 135 students going to other districts by taking in 126, a deficit of nine that costs the district $782,000.

But there is a process the district follows. Every application for open enrollment is reviewed by the Instructional Office, which considers factors such as building capacity, which has increased somewhat as a result of the district’s recent building initiative, and will not accept a student if it means adding additional teaching staff, Hancock said, according to acceptable teacher-to-student ratios that are outlined in the district policy, which can be viewed on the district Web site.

The district will not accept students who have been expelled from their home district or anyone with a history of discipline problems, he said.

The Barrington family lives on the outskirts of Millville, technically in the Talawanda City School District, but not far from the borders of Ross and Hamilton schools.

Although mom Rachel Barrington teaches English as a Second Language in Talawanda, she takes her daughter Grace to a Hamilton elementary every day, taking advantage of Ohio’s open enrollment.

“We’ve always just been more involved in the Hamilton community,” Barrington said. “So when Hamilton started offering open enrollment five years ago, we moved over.” The other Barrington daughter, Claire, went to Monroe Elementary prior to the opening of Ridgeway and stayed in Hamilton schools up through the seventh grade, but now a freshman, she does her school work through the on-line Ohio Virtual Academy.

In order to give parents more options for the education of their children, open enrollment in Ohio became possible in 1989 through Senate Bill 140, part of a larger education reform initiative, which also allowed high school students to take college courses for both high school and college credit. After a two-year pilot program involving three Ohio districts, schools were given the option whether to participate in the program, either by accepting students from adjacent district or from anywhere in the state, or to decline to participate.

Officials at Lakota, Fairfield and Ross said they don’t accept students because of space issues.

“Until recently, Lakota has not had the capacity to accept students who live outside the district because population growth had been so steep for so long,” said spokesman Elliot Grossman. “At times, Lakota was opening a new school almost every year to accommodate enrollment growth.”

Fairfield spokesperson Gina Gentry-Fletcher said the bottom line for Fairfield has been space.

“We want to provide educational services for students who live within the city and township,” she said. “With our financial situation, they have to be our educational priority.”

Ross Superintendent Greg Young echoed both those reasons for not accepting outside students.

“We just completed a 10 year enrollment projection that shows our enrollment increasing slightly over that 10 year period of time,” he said. “I think if I was in a district where we were losing enrollment, certainly it would be a consideration.”

Lakota wasn’t able to provide a number of students opting for open enrollment outside the district, but Fairfield reported 85 and Ross 14.

“Typically about one-third of those using open enrollment to attend other districts involve kindergarten,” Young said. “Parents have their children attend another district that has all day kindergarten since we only have one-half day kindergarten. They usually return to Ross for first grade.”

New Miami Schools also signed on to open enrollment for financial reasons, and nets 69 more students this year, adding nearly $400,000 to the district’s income, a significant amount considering its annual budget of $11.4 million.

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