Across Florida, school districts have created open enrollment policies that allow students to attend traditional public schools outside their neighborhood zones.
Under bills moving through both chambers of the state Legislature, they could soon become ubiquitous. The legislation (SB 1552/HB 1145) would require all districts to create policies allowing students to move to any public school with space available, and to cross district lines if their parents prefer.
A question sits in the background of the ongoing debate in the Legislature, and in recent school board discussions about expanding parental choice in the systems they oversee: What is the right mix of schools of choice, and schools of right?
During the 2013-14 school year, nearly one of every 10 Florida public school students attend schools under some form of open enrollment policy, making it one of the state’s most widely used forms of school choice. That number does not include magnet programs, career academies, or other choice programs run by school districts.
The policies give districts a way to offer more choices within their systems, and in some cases, may help them manage rapid growth of their student populations.
Yet the spread of open enrollment has been uneven, and has ebbed and flowed over time.
The map above shows the rates of open enrollment participation in Florida’s school districts during the 2013-14 school year. Darker districts reported high rates of participating students to the state Department of Education; districts colored white reported zero students participating.
Of the roughly 272,000 open-enrollment students statewide, more than a quarter live in Lee County. Home to the fast-growing Fort Myers metro area, officials in the Southwest Florida district have found a district-wide system of choice to be more workable than an annual redrawing of school boundaries to accommodate constant influxes of new students.
Some Florida school districts, like Pinellas, have seen the pendulum swing back in the direction of neighborhood zones, and dialed back their open enrollment policies after finding too many students were displaced from nearby schools. More than 8,000 Pinellas students still used the option last school year (see a statewide data breakdown here).
Others, like Duval and Palm Beach, have debated moving toward open enrollment, often pitching their plans as ways to compete with charter schools. But both districts, the largest in Florida without open enrollment policies, ultimately put those plans on hold, citing community concerns.
As a result, those are two places the pending legislation could have a substantial impact.
The Senate last week made revisions that would allow districts to manage the new open enrollment programs within their existing choice systems. The bill is also worded so that it only requires districts to allow students to move to schools where there is excess space available. Sponsor Lizbeth Benacquisto, R-Fort Myers, said that would help districts avoid “displacing children who are, first and foremost, zoned for those schools.”
In most of America’s school systems, even in places like Florida where choice has become mainstream, families still demand more school options than are currently available to them – as evidenced by charter school waiting lists, exhausted demand for private school scholarships, and floods of applications for district choice programs.
At the same time, for many families, there may be value in knowing there is a school close by, where transportation is provided, admission is guaranteed, and they can be confident their children will receive a quality education.
“I think one of the strengths we have in the public education system — certainly including charters — are the options for neighborhood schools,” state Sen. Bill Montford, D-Tallahassee, a former school administrator, said during a recent legislative hearing on the bill. “You live in your neighborhood, you know your teachers, you know your neighbors, and you can walk to school. It’s the old American way, if you will.”
It may be possible for all-choice, or even all-charter, systems to provide that same guarantee. The push and pull of open enrollment, and the debate over the proliferation of charter schools in urban areas like Washington D.C and New Orleans, suggests that as school choice grows, different districts will come to different conclusions about what the right balance is.
As long as that’s done in the interest of students, rather than protecting the administrative prerogatives of adults, it’s a reasonable debate to have.
