WICHITA — A new state law that goes into effect next fall lets Kansas students attend schools outside the districts where they live, as long as there is space available.
School leaders in some high-demand districts say they’re already hearing from families who want to enroll. But they say the new law won’t be simple, and they’re not ready to just throw open their doors.
“We were getting calls in July of ’22 saying, ‘Hey, I heard this passed. Sign me up. I’m ready to come,’” said Brett White, superintendent of the Andover school district east of Wichita.
“But there’s lots of behind-the-scenes work going on as we think through those processes,” he said. “It’s a lot to develop, and it’s going to really consume our next few months.”
Kansas lawmakers passed House Bill 2567 last year. It included funding for the state’s K-12 schools as well as controversial policy measures such as the open enrollment provision.
Conservatives who pushed for the law see it as a way to help families move their kids out of local schools that aren’t meeting their needs. It echoes laws in more than two dozen other states where public school transfers are seen as a hallmark of school choice.
Public school leaders who opposed open enrollment say the change complicates the already challenging process of forecasting student numbers and making sure there are enough teachers and classrooms to serve them.
“To not have certainty based in part on the geography of our school boundaries about how many students we will have — that makes long-term planning very difficult,” said Jeff Jarman, a school board member for the Maize district west of Wichita.
“It’s really important … that we carefully consider future growth. It is not fair to our taxpayers to allow students from out of the district, who are not paying property tax, to come in and potentially take seats.”
Maize and Andover schools, like those in Johnson County, are viewed by many as desirable alternatives to larger urban districts such as Wichita and Kansas City, Kan. Real estate listings praise the districts, many of which continue to grow while the state’s overall enrollment has declined. Suburban districts also tend to have higher tax rates than their urban counterparts.
The open enrollment law requires districts to have a policy in place by Jan. 1 that establishes their process for deciding how many nonresident students they’ll accept. By May 1, districts will have to declare the number of open seats at each grade level and will publish them on their websites by June 1.
Maize’s new nonresident enrollment policy directs the superintendent or a designee — likely each principal — to make that call for each grade level in kindergarten through eighth grade, based on student-teacher ratios, predicted growth and classroom capacity.
For high school, capacity will be determined by student-teacher ratios for each building.
Jarman, the Maize board member, said districts should be conservative with their number of open seats to prevent a scramble for more teachers or classroom space this year or years down the line.
“The problem is allowing elementary students to attend, and then three or four years later, when they’re in intermediate or middle school, we might have created a crisis in those buildings based on something that happened years earlier,” he said. “So caution is the strategy we must employ.”
