photo by: Lawrence school district

In the wake of a new law broadening school choice, the Lawrence school district is hopeful that it can increase enrollment and gain state education dollars by receiving students from other districts, but it’s taking a self-described “conservative” approach to avoid overwhelming its schools.

At a special meeting Tuesday, the Lawrence school board voted 5-0, with Anne Costello and Carole Cadue-Blackwood absent, to approve the district’s recommendations on teacher-to-student ratios, school capacity and enrollment projections.

Under a new state law, each school district had to declare by May 1 how many students it could accept from outside its boundaries. The purpose of the law is to increase options for students by letting them attend a school of their choice if there’s room for them.

Accordingly, the Lawrence district had to determine several things: district capacity, the number of students expected to attend and the number of open seats available to nonresidents at each grade, building or program level.

The district indicated that its capacity, based on full-time equivalency, is 4,285 elementary students, 2,200 middle school students and 3,415 high school students.

Capacity does not refer to physical capacity of a building but to other considerations such as staffing levels and the number of returning students.

The district used the following student-to-teacher ratios in its calculations: in K-5, one teacher to 24 students; in middle school, one to 21 or 22 students; and in grades 9-12, one to 24.

With the middle schools, the district said it provided for “flexibility” in the student-teacher ratio because of the transition to a new STEAM curriculum at Liberty Memorial Central Middle School.

Board member Shannon Kimball noted that all of those ratios “are lower at every level” than for the current school year. This year, for example, the ratio for grades 4-5 is one to 30.

Ratio does not mean class size, but refers generally to resources allocated to a building. A choir class, for example, might have 50 students, while an advanced math class might have a dozen.

For the 2024-25 school year, the district expects to have 4,223 elementary students, 2,198 middle school students and 3,294 high school students.

The number of seats available to nonresidents, based on its calculations, is generally 30 total in grades K-5, 12 total in the middle schools and 60 total in the high schools (40 at Lawrence High School and 20 at Free State High School). The numbers — totaling around 100 for the district as a whole — are broken down by each school on the district’s website.

In figuring out how many seats would be open to outsiders, the district took a “conservative” approach, according to Ron May, director of Human Relations, Safety and Transportation. In estimating seats open to outsiders the district kept an equal number of spots in reserve for students moving into the district or transfers later in the school year. Opening up all of the spots and not keeping any in reserve could overwhelm any particular school, May said.

He noted that the district’s calculations create a general framework and that there would always be “case-by case considerations” for out-of-district transfers.

The way the transfer process works is that beginning June 1 people will be able to go online and see where spaces are available. If there are more requests than openings, decisions will be made via lottery, and parents should know by mid-July whether their student has been accepted.

Although school districts can indicate that they have no open spots, the Kansas Department of Education is expected to audit every district’s capacity yearly, under the new law.

Schools are funded mainly through property taxes and state aid, generally based on enrollment numbers, which have been falling in Lawrence and which led to the recent closure of two elementary schools, as the Journal-World has reported. Property taxes from a student’s home district will not follow students to their new schools, but state aid eventually will.

Kimball, voicing appreciation for the district’s conservative approach in its calculations, said, “I feel like we are really in line with reasonable expectations about determining capacity.”