2023-10-31 05:04:43
CHARLESTON — Changes made by the West Virginia Legislature over the last several years allowing parents the option to transfer their children to a different public school have helped the state improve in educational freedom rankings.
According to “Public Schools Without Boundaries,” an annual report published last week by the Reason Foundation, an organization promoting libertarian principles, West Virginia was among six states including Arkansas, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska and North Dakota to make “major improvements” in open enrollment laws.
The Reason Foundation looks at five best practices for state open enrollment policies of access to statewide cross-district open enrollment, inter-district open enrollment, transparent reporting of open enrollment data, transparent reporting of school capacity data and school districts that do not charge tuition.
While West Virginia’s constitution prohibits public schools from charging tuition, that was the only one of the five criteria the state met as of Reason’s 2022 report.
But according to the 2023 report, a law the Legislature passed earlier this year helped West Virginia meet three out of five open enrollment criteria. House Bill 2596, sponsored by House Education Committee Vice Chairman Christopher Toney, R-Raleigh, allows county boards of education to create attendance zones within the county.
The law allows a county board to permit any eligible elementary, middle and high school resident student to apply for enrollment in any school in the county as long as the school has the grade-level capacity and certain programs and services outside the attendance zone where the student resides prior to transfer. County board transfer decisions can be appealed to the state superintendent of schools.
HB 2596 also allows for open enrollment for public school students between counties without requiring the approval of the county the student resides in prior to transfer. Counties are required to develop applications for county-to-county transfer and an application period.
Counties can give enrollment preferences to siblings of students enrolled in another county, students in grades 10-12 who desire to remain in a school even though their families have moved to another counties, students who are the legal wards of school employees and students who may live in another county but live closer to a school in a nearby county.
“Gov. Jim Justice signed House Bill 2596 … into law, which requires all school districts to participate in both cross- and within-district open enrollment,” wrote Jude Schwalbach, a policy analyst for the Reason Foundation. “Under the new law, West Virginia now meets three out of five best open enrollment practices, instead of just one.”
HB 2596 passed the House of Delegates and state Senate unanimously and signed by Justice on March 4. The bill was praised by Craig Hulse, executive director of yes. every kid, a school choice advocacy organization.
“A family’s income or ZIP code shouldn’t matter when it comes to their child’s education,” Hulse said in a statement in March. “Every kid deserves access to the best education possible — and for too long, residential assignment has prevented this.”
Schwalbach said while it was good that West Virginia was making improvement in open enrollment, more needs to be done when it comes to data transparency, including additional public reporting of enrollment data by the state Department of Education and the Legislative Oversight Commission on Education Accountability.
“The Mountain State requires the State Department of Education to collect important open enrollment data, including the number of transfer applicants accepted or rejected, and the reasons why applications were rejected, and to report this data by July 30 each year,” Schwalbach said. “While some of this data could be made public at LOCEA meetings, it does not have to be published.”
The Department of Education or the education accountability commission should publish the open enrollment report in a way the public can access, Schwalbach said. County school systems should post grade-level available capacity and establish waitlists for inter-county and county-to-county transfers and notify those on the waitlist when space becomes available, he said.
“Every year, each school district must post its number of accepted or rejected transfer students on its website. School districts are also required to post their open enrollment policies and procedures online, but do not have to post their available capacity by grade level,” Schwalbach said. “This is commendable progress, but West Virginia policymakers can still improve their open enrollment policies …”
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