Policy Implications
Policymakers have three key issues to consider as more students take advantage of open-enrollment opportunities.
First, traditional methods of school transportation, such as the large yellow school bus, are no longer efficient because many transfer students, especially rural ones, don’t live along designated bus routes. Getting to school is often a challenge for students using open enrollment because 44 states, including those discussed here, do not require the receiving school districts to provide transportation to cross-district transfer students. In some states, school districts can even stop other districts from transporting transfer students across district boundaries, often disproportionately affecting students from low-income families. While families and receiving school districts can establish designated bus pick-up locations just over district boundaries, this option is only available to students whose families can drive them to those locations.
These transportation challenges combined with long commutes mean that open-enrollment participation in rural areas or small towns will generally be lower than in urban and suburban districts. However, state policymakers can modify regulations that needlessly impede students from transferring. For instance, they can stop allowing school districts to prevent other districts from transporting transfer students across district boundaries.
State policymakers could also take note of Arizona’s recent transportation reforms, which let school districts use passenger vans that seat 11 to 15 people instead of the traditional yellow school bus. This sort of innovation can lower the costs of transporting small groups of transfer students. Such policies can be key to helping students access schooling options that are the right fit, even if they don’t live nearby.
Policymakers might also do well to reconsider how to fund capital projects. While local levies often paid for these projects in the past, school districts will have a harder time convincing local taxpayers to approve new bonds when their children don’t attend their residentially assigned school.
For instance, Arizona’s Queen Creek Unified School District has failed to gain voter approval for bond funding for three years in a row. In fact, only 40 percent of voters supported the bond in November 2023. Part of the reason the bond has failed is that many of the students living inside the district’s boundaries don’t attend the district’s schools, opting instead for charter schools or schools in other districts. In fact, nearly 20 percent of Queen Creek’s students came from other districts during the 2021–22 school year. This district’s situation isn’t atypical; 30 percent of Arizona students don’t attend public schools in their assigned district. This illustrates that policymakers in states with robust school choice policies need to rethink how capital projects are funded.
Finally, policymakers can hold school districts’ admissions practices to a higher standard by stopping them from rejecting transfer applicants with disabilities. Many school districts are quick to cap the number of transfer applicants with disabilities based on the program capacity of their special education courses, often citing insufficient staffing. However, this practice unfairly limits schooling options for students with disabilities. It also means that traditional public schools’ admittance procedures operate at a lower bar than public charter schools’ admittance procedures, which require that all applicants be admitted, assuming seats are available. Accordingly, policymakers could take a closer look at school districts’ admissions processes to ensure that district schools are open to all students.
