Supporters of Indiana’s policy allowing students to attend any public school district they choose have long argued it creates positive competition that engenders innovation in the classroom and boosts student achievement. But Taylor Community Schools Superintendent Steve Dishon said more than anything, open enrollment has turned his district into a marketing agency. Rather than solely focusing on education, the Howard County school district now spends time and money on newspaper ads, billboards and branding campaigns to attract out-of-district students.
“Things like that take away from what our purpose is,” he said. “We’re here to educate, and it’s just made us do things we never wanted to or had to do.”
Before 2008, families who wanted to send a student to an out-of-district public school had to pay tuition for the child to attend the school. Now, students can move freely from district to district, with the state’s per-pupil funding following the student wherever they go. For the 2024-25 school year in Indiana, $6,600 follows each student to their new school.
Sixteen years after state lawmakers first approved open enrollment, many Indiana superintendents say the policy hasn’t led to more robust academic outcomes. Rather, it’s created financial headaches that force them to look outside the classroom for solutions.
‘A strong threat’
Republican-led efforts to expand the state’s private-school voucher program for years have drawn the most debate among school-choice advocates, teachers unions and parents.
But in a state where school funding follows the student, open enrollment has by far had the biggest impact on school budgets and how districts think about attracting students.
An analysis of education data by WFYI, an Indianapolis affiliate of PBS, revealed that about twothirds of Indiana’s 290 districts lost students last school year because of school-choice policies. The primary reason for the overall enrollment decline came not from voucher programs — in which the state gives tuition assistance to private school students — but from students transferring to another public school district.
In fact, out of the top 20 districts losing students, just one was more impacted by families using vouchers than by student flight through open enrollment.
Today, the policy is the primary reason many school administrators worry about their district’s fiscal survival, argued Patrick Wolf, head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.
“That’s sort of the competition that they’re most concerned about,” said Wolf, who has studied Indiana’s school-choice policies. “That really changes their mindset much more significantly than vouchers. It’s a stronger threat to them, and I think they take it a lot more seriously.”
‘Moving target’
Northeast School Corp. Superintendent Dustin Hitt said that’s the case in Sullivan County, where his district is located. The mostly rural area has two public school districts, a charter school and two small parochial schools.
Many Northeast students are transferring to the area’s other district, Southwest School Corp. Hitt’s district last school year saw a 35% net loss of student population. Northeast schools have shed more than 500 students during the past decade and now have a total enrollment of 770.
With just a handful of schools in the area, he explained, it’s a crap shoot every year when it comes to which district will see an increase or decrease in students. That can lead to financial instability for public school systems in Indiana, where state funding is determined by a district’s enrollment.
“It’s kind of this moving target where you don’t know where the students are going to end up, or why they might leave and go someplace else,” Hitt said.
For some students, the decision has little to do with academics. It may come down to which football or basketball team is doing particularly well that season, or could stem from an issue with a particular teacher or principal, he explained.
Regardless of the reasons, losing a group of students means a district may have to cut a teaching position or new program to address the funding shortfall. Such austerity measures can trigger a downward spiral for enrollment, Hitt noted.
“When it gets out there that the school is cutting this or that, parents sometimes think the sky is falling,” he said. “That’s kind of the feeling I think that the families can get and they say, ‘Oh, man, we’d better jump ship while we can.’” It’s the opposite story at Frankton-Lapel Community Schools. The Madison County district last year had nearly 1,000 out-of-district students who brought in more than $6.5 million in revenue.
But the surge in students hasn’t been all good news, explained Superintendent Sterling Boles. The funding that follows the student can only be used for teacher and staff salaries, not building or maintenance spending. That money comes only from property-tax dollars.
“If anything, this has stressed our operations fund,” Boles said.” Our capital projects, bus replacement and transportation department budgets are exactly the same whether we have 3,000 students or 2,000 students.”
That’s forced the district to transfer 15% of its education funding — the most allowed by Indiana law — to its operations budget. The smaller education fund has made it hard to give pay raises to staff, Boles noted.
He said the only solution to “level the playing field” is for state lawmakers to look at how operation budgets could be funded to allow districts to effectively upgrade schools and supply buses in response to fluctuations in enrollment.
‘Advertising machine’
Open enrollment may create unpredictable education funding, but some superintendents say it has created the kind of competition that’s led their district to implement new programs, classes and extracurricular activities that appeal to students.
Chuck Reynolds, Muncie Community Schools’ director of public education, said he “appreciates the flexibility open enrollment gives families so they can choose the school that best fits their child’s needs.”
The school is positioned within a few miles of nine other districts, including two charters and private parochial schools.
Those options have created strong competition for students, and Muncie has felt the consequences. Last year, the district experienced a net enrollment loss of 31% to other public schools, according to the WFYI analysis.
Even so, that’s forced administrators to take innovative approaches to attract students, Reynolds explained.
“Because of this, we must continue to offer outstanding programming, the best instructors and excellent extracurricular opportunities to draw families,” he wrote in an email. “We also need to make sure people know about all we offer and our numerous success stories.”
But that’s a problem for Taylor Superintendent Dishon, who said open enrollment has turned his district into an “advertising machine.”
The school is vying with five other nearby public- school districts for the area’s students, and every district offers outstanding educational and extracurricular opportunities, he argued.
“Every school in this area is excellent,” he said. “The idea that a child has to go somewhere else because a school isn’t providing an education really just doesn’t exist.”
Hitt with Northwest School Corp. agreed half the battle to attract students is fashioning a certain public perception about what a school stands for and the atmosphere it creates.
“It is almost like a marketing game anymore,” he said. “You’re always kind of trying to market your brand, market your name, so to speak, just to show what you do well and try to get kids to want to come to your school corporation.”
At Indianapolis Public Schools, which has lost more students than anywhere in the state in the face of constant competition, the district last year paid $269,600 to a consulting firm just to recruit and retain students.
Beyond advertising, Dishon said, Taylor schools — to boost enrollment and bring in more revenue — also spend extra money to send buses all over Howard County to pick up kids who can’t drive to their school buildings. That’s required the district to hire another fulltime bus driver.
Winners and losers
In worst-case scenarios, districts end up closing schools and enacting layoffs in the face of plummeting enrollment numbers. That happened in Anderson Community School Corporation
in 2010. Even before the 2008 recession, the last of local GM plants that had employed around 25,000 closed, forcing families to leave the city. That, combined with the state’s recently enacted open enrollment policy, forced the district to shutter an entire high school, with other building closures soon to follow.
Over the last few years, enrollment numbers have leveled out and remained steady, allowing the district to maintain its current buildings and avoid redistricting the school corporation, explained Brad Meadows, director of district and community engagement.
Still, the district saw more than 3,160 students transfer to other schools last year — the fourth-highest number in the state, according to a data analysis by Indiana University’s School of Education.
That instability makes operating schools difficult, but it’s even harder on the students, explained Meadows.
“We already have a very transient student population,” he wrote in an email. “School choice only further compounds that.”
The on-the-ground reality of open enrollment becomes even more muddled when looking at how the policy impacts students’ academic achievement. Research offers mixed results on whether students benefit or are hindered by transferring to a school outside their home district.
A 2009 study from the University of Florida investigating one of the state’s largest school districts found those who transfer to an out-of-district school often perform significantly worse on standardized tests than similar students who stay in their home district.
But a 2023 study by the school-choice advocacy group Reason Foundation found school districts in Wisconsin that lost students to open enrollment initially improved on state tests soon afterward.
Indiana data shows the state’s open enrollment policy has created winners and losers in the public school system, argued Christopher Lubienski, director of the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy at Indiana University.
Rather than study the actual outcomes for students, though, lawmakers are more interested in whether parents support and use the programs, he said.
Boles with Frankton-Lapel schools said he doesn’t see open enrollment creating winners and losers. Instead, it’s led districts to hone in on what they do best and cater their programs to the students who chose to attend their schools.
“I believe that every district uses multiple resources to provide quality educational opportunities in their particular environment,” he said. “Each district has unique challenges and we often learn from each other’s successes and failures.”
But at Anderson schools, which has lost students in droves, it’s hard to see any benefits from the state’s long-standing policy, explained Meadows.
“From a public school’s perspective, there are none,” he said.