SC students deserve public options beyond school district lines
This op-ed, written by Ryan Dellinger and originally published in The Post and Courier, addresses some common concerns arising regarding South Carolina’s pending open enrollment rules – rules that would permit public school students to transfer to a new school across district lines.
Columbia, S.C. (The Post and Courier) – Last year, the S.C. Legislature passed a revamped school choice bill that reestablished the Education Scholarship Trust Fund after it was struck down by the state Supreme Court. Included in Section 12 of that bill was a requirement that the State Department of Education create model interdistrict transfer guidelines for public school districts and that districts adopt a conforming policy or risk losing some state funding until they comply.
Just a few short months ago, the draft guidelines were released and opened for public comment. The Education Department will review these comments, determine what (if any) changes to the draft guidelines are warranted and then release a final version in what I hope will be the near future.
The happy upshot of the guidelines is that students soon will be able to request to transfer to a school district outside of their current district.
Intradistrict open enrollment — transferring to another school within the same district — has been an option across the state for a number of years. My home school district of Greenville County opens a window for students to request a transfer to a different school within the district every year. Richland One offers intradistrict transfer options, as does Charleston County.
However, things get more complicated when students seek to cross district lines and attend a district where they do not live and, therefore, are not paying the local taxes that provide a significant portion of their school’s revenue. There is some concern that the state will force schools to accept students from other districts and overcrowd their own classrooms. The schools, some people fear, will have to do more with less because they will be forced to educate more kids with the same amount of money.
This is simply not a realistic complaint.
The draft guidelines require that the districts conduct a capacity study for each school to determine how many students that school can accept, and several of the data points in the study are tied to locally controlled issues. For example, if the local school board has established a student-to-teacher ratio for the district, the district may use that ratio when calculating class capacity. The district can also use its board policy when calculating capacity for specialized programs, such as career and technical education classes or academic remediation programs.
Most importantly, once those studies are completed and the district knows each school’s maximum capacity by school building, grade level, class, specialized program and capacity for individual tutoring and assistance, only those that are at less than 90 percent of capacity will be required to accept interdistrict transfer students. The state will not be forcing more students into already-overcrowded classrooms.
The model guidelines address funding as well. They allow districts to charge an “interdistrict transfer fee” up to the previous year’s per-student local tax revenue. This would help offset the lack of local funding that the students’ families would normally generate through their local taxes, meaning that schools will not be forced to redistribute already-limited resources across more students.
Rest assured, no one wants more state mandates than what we already have, but these open enrollment guidelines would simply provide families who would otherwise be trapped in a school that does not meet their children’s needs with the ability to look elsewhere for a high-quality education.
We at Palmetto Promise submitted a public comment detailing how we’d like to see the rules improved, including doing away with interdistrict transfer fees (since they can prevent low income families from taking advantage of these guidelines) and tweaking how often capacity studies have to be conducted (to ensure that growing schools are not using outdated capacity numbers and arbitrarily refusing transfer requests based on those numbers).
However, even if no changes are made to the final model guidelines, it is a significant step forward for education freedom in South Carolina.
No matter what the final guidelines look like, school administrators who are faced with open enrollment transfer requests should take it as a compliment of their schools rather than an attack on them.
Families in other districts see what they are doing, recognize that it is working and want their child to be a part of it. Even though winter has hit South Carolina hard in recent weeks, now is not the time to leave these kids out in the cold. They need help, they are looking for something better, and as a state, we should give it to them.
