Johnson County school districts like Olathe and Blue Valley saw themselves as elite, offering a high-end public education families would jump at if only they could afford the housing prices.
So they worried an open enrollment law would overwhelm them with students whose families suddenly didn’t have to worry about the cost of moving into the district.
But during the first year that Kansas required school districts to open their doors to children from outside their boundaries, the expected flood of applications looks more like a trickle.
Olathe, Blue Valley and Shawnee Mission accepted a few dozen applicants each — a drop in the bucket compared to their overall enrollments between 20,000 and 30,000.
That could mean parents are happy with their local schools, are unaware of their new mobility or are struggling with how to get their kids a ride to school.
The limited number of extra students some districts said they could fit might play a role as well. Blue Valley announced less than 100 openings split between two schools.
But even districts that offered more space — Shawnee Mission offered up more than 1,000 open seats across the district — didn’t see high application numbers.
Public school groups that opposed state-mandated open enrollment are framing the slow uptake as a vote of confidence for local schools.
It’s predictable that public schools would see low numbers of students moving districts, said Leah Fliter, a lobbyist for the Kansas Association of School Boards.
“Kansas school districts do a great job educating their local kids,” she said. “Parents realize that.”
Families need more time to understand their new options, said James Franko, president of the conservative Kansas Policy Institute, which spoke in favor of open enrollment.
“For generations, we’ve been raised where you kind of go to your quote, unquote, ‘neighborhood school’ or your district school,” he said. “It just takes time for those kinds of things to really gain community awareness, let alone community acceptance or adoption.”
Open enrollment
Starting this year, Kansas law forced districts to estimate how many more students they could fit into every grade after kids in the district enrolled.
Some Johnson County districts worried that their good reputations, particularly for providing expensive special education, would draw flocks of students bringing in crushing costs.
“Without intending to sound elitist, it is nonetheless true that housing costs in our districts often provide a check on resident student growth now,” Olathe and Blue Valley leaders said in written testimony to the Legislature in 2022.
Without the barrier of pricey housing, some Blue Valley residents thought extra students would pour into their schools.
In social media posts that echoed anti-immigrant language (#OpenBorders), public school booster group Stand Up Blue Valley said the proposal could overcrowd classrooms, speed teacher burnout and cost resident students their positions on sports teams.
Shawnee Mission playbook for lobbying the Legislature says open enrollment rules also pose an administrative burden.
The district is among the 94% of school districts that already allowed open enrollment in some form, said G.A. Buie, executive director of the United School Administrators of Kansas and the Kansas School Superintendents’ Association.
The law imposed a specific process, he said. “That is an extra burden on them, because they had to change what they’ve always done.”
The Kansas City, Kansas, school district wasn’t sure whether open enrollment would take students from the district or draw them in, but it objected to the uncertainty the new policy brought.
Spokesperson Edwin Birch said the district doesn’t yet have data on how many students joined the district through open enrollment.
Multiple districts told The Beacon they won’t know how many students have left for open enrollment in other districts.
Why Johnson County open enrollment numbers are low
For Johnson County schools, a few factors may have stemmed the anticipated tides.
Buie said the biggest limiting factor is lack of interest.
“It’s a small percentage (of families) in a community that don’t have trust or faith in their school district,” Buie said.
For families who are interested, transportation can get in the way, he said. Districts aren’t required to transport non-resident students.
Franko, the Kansas Policy Institute president, said the program may grow over time, and that it’s worthwhile to help whatever percentage of families want to use it.
“The goal shouldn’t be open enrollment in itself,” he said. “It should be giving parents and families and guardians the wherewithal and the agency to actually go out and find the right fit for their kid.”
He said some districts underestimated how much space they had available.
“Many have basically just erected walls around their district and said, ‘You can’t come here unless you live here,’” he said. “That violates the spirit of what we’re trying to do.”
The state department of education will audit districts’ capacity annually.
How Johnson County schools determined capacity
Deciding how many students fit in a building is complicated, said Kim Frerichs, an education planner with architecture, engineering and interior design company EUA.
Schools have to look at recommended class sizes, how many students fit in the space and how much of the space will realistically be used at once.
For example, when elementary students go to the cafeteria or the gym, their classroom usually sits empty, she said. High school classrooms are vacant during teacher planning periods.
“It’s unreasonable and unsustainable to expect everyone is running at 100% capacity,” she said.
Schools also have to factor in how many teachers they’ve hired and how much room they need to leave for students who might enroll mid-school year, especially if there’s a housing boom or growing job opportunities in an area.
Blue Valley
The Blue Valley School District decided to admit students only to schools that were predicted to be less than 75% full, in order to allow extra space for in-district students who might enroll partway through the year.
Staffing can prove as tricky as space.
A school with three second grade teachers, for example, and a maximum class size of 25 would be more than 75% full if the district predicted it would have 57 second graders, or 19 students per class.
Those sorts of calculations by the district left it with only 86 total openings split between one elementary school and one high school. The district had 48 applicants for open enrollment.
Shawnee Mission
Even districts that opened more spots saw few takers.
Shawnee Mission found 1,074 empty seats and accepted only 38 students, more than 40% of them from Kansas City, Kansas, public schools and about 20% each from the Turner school district and private and parochial schools.
The district calculated capacity based on class size, but only left two to four open spots in each classroom, depending on grade level and whether the school had a high concentration of low-income families.
The district also closed schools to open enrollment if the schools they fed into were full, or if they were too close to specific enrollment numbers that Shawnee Mission considers ideal.
For example, an elementary school with too many total classes has problems scheduling specials like PE and music, spokesperson David Smith said.
Smith said he doesn’t know why districts reached such different conclusions about capacity.
“Ours was a very technical, building-by-building process,” he said. “We took the law seriously and attempted to comply as best we could.”
Olathe
Olathe fell somewhere in the middle.
In a 14-page document, Olathe explained how it used staffing levels, enrollment trends and new apartment buildings cropping up in the area to predict enrollment. The district also considered how many students might join during the school year.
It excluded open enrollment at nine of its 51 buildings — including elementary, middle and high schools — because they were already at 80% or more of capacity.
The district ultimately offered 590 open seats but filled less than 80.
They came from 12 districts, primarily Gardner, Shawnee Mission, Spring Hill and Blue Valley. About three quarters were from Johnson County. Nearly half had attended Olathe schools before, Jill Smith, assistant superintendent for elementary education, told the school board.
“Elementary had 386 openings that could be available for families,” Smith said. “We had 28 applications. That’s a big difference.”
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
