Douglas County schools have always welcomed students from other districts, and Kansas recently mandated open enrollment statewide to allow families to move their children from schools that aren’t meeting their needs. Despite this, public school enrollment is still on the decline.

The new, controversial statewide open enrollment law – or the Kansas school district choice law – was passed in 2022, and it allows Kansas students to attend schools outside of the districts where they live, as long as there is space available.

Supporters of the law see it as a way for families to shift their children out of local schools that aren’t fulfilling their needs. This reflects a trend seen in more than twenty other states, where transferring between public schools is viewed as a fundamental element of school choice. In contrast, there are several public school leaders who oppose open enrollment and argue that it exacerbates the already challenging process of predicting student numbers and ensuring there are sufficient teachers and classroom space to meet demand.

School districts across Douglas County reported their out-of-district student acceptance numbers for the 2024-2025 school year to the Journal-World. The Lawrence school district has accepted 58 nonresident transfer requests; Baldwin City welcomed nine students; and the Perry-Lecompton district saw the highest number, with 188 students. The Eudora school district was not able to provide the number of students enrolled from outside the district by the time this story was published.

Josh Woodward, superintendent of the Perry-Lecompton school district, noted an uptick in students transferring from other districts. However, he was uncertain whether this rise was attributable to the new open enrollment legislation or if it simply reflected typical fluctuations in their district numbers.

“As those nonresidential requests started coming in on June 1st, it was pretty much spread out throughout the grade levels,” Woodward said. “There wasn’t one specific grade level that has a ton more kids than another grade level.”

Mark Dodge, superintendent of the Baldwin City school district, noted that the change in the application window for families this year might have affected their out-of-district enrollment numbers.

“The one thing that it did, that I think is detrimental to families, is it limited this window through the month of June,” Dodge said. “In the past, we were accepting students all the way through the balance of the school year.”

“But with this being the first year of us going through this process, we’ve decided to not accept nonresidents outside that window,” Dodge said.

photo by: Contributed

Perry-Lecompton High School

Overall, Stu Moeckel, superintendent of Eudora Public Schools, said it’s a little too early to tell if the new legislation is going to make a large impact on their school district.

Although all the Douglas County school districts mentioned that they do not monitor the reasons parents leave their districts for others, Woodward stated that his district does track the reasons parents are interested in enrolling their children there.

He said they saw an increase in enrollment around when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and a lot of the parents were interested in enrolling in a smaller or rural school district — Woodward said it was a priority for the school district to protect those smaller class sizes. Woodward also suspected that parents just may have not been aware of the opportunities to explore other school districts.

School districts continue to receive base state aid for each out-of-district student enrolled as of Sept. 20. Typically, school districts do not accept students after this date because there is no base state aid funding available for their enrollment, Woodward said.

As the Journal-World reported, last year, the Lawrence school district completed its annual enrollment count and found a decline of 299 students compared to the previous year. This drop in just one year matches the amount a consultant had forecast for a five-year period. The audited enrollment figure for 2022 was 10,957, while 2023’s preliminary, unaudited figure was at 10,658.

Lawrence district spokesperson Julie Boyle said in an email that public school enrollment has declined nationwide. U.S. birth rates have declined, including in Douglas County. She said, for example, that in May of 2023, the district graduated 944 seniors and enrolled only 674 kindergartners the following fall.

“Our enrollment had been flat or declining before COVID-19, and then dropped significantly during the pandemic,” Boyle said in a response via email. “For safety reasons, some families chose to delay their children’s start to school or homeschool their children, or they chose other school options because of school safety protocols, such as masking/quarantine requirements, and educational delivery models, such as remote learning and hybrid remote/in-person learning.”

Despite the declines in enrollment, the school districts mentioned they are actively seeking strategies to boost enrollment and draw in more families. Dodge said the Baldwin City school district is always looking for ways to keep enrollment consistent and bring in more students.

“We’re trying to make sure that our programming is matching the interests of our kids and we’re trying to provide a balanced and well rounded education that includes academics, the arts, athletics and taking care of our students,” Dodge said.