September 7, 2022 | Issue #10

Why is Open Enrollment Important to Yorkville?

The topic of open enrollment has stirred up many conversations over the past two plus decades. Open enrollment existed in Milwaukee, Racine, and Kenosha for many years prior, but in 1998 the State of Wisconsin legislated into law public school choice, available to all Wisconsin student’s families.

Can you imagine if the second largest expenditure of a school district’s annual budget was open enrollment?  

For example, IF for Yorkville, the number of resident students choosing to attend a neighboring public school (e.g. Racine, Raymond, UGES) was significantly greater than the number of children living in neighboring districts, and choosing to open-enroll to Yorkville. In other words, the net loss of student headcount through open enrollment became so great that, in essence, we were writing checks to our neighbors. So much in fact that in this scenario, this becomes our second largest expenditure.  

More money in this example is spent on children leaving the district than is spent on maintenance, projects/repairs, information technology, curriculum, classroom supplies, and more. WOW. That hurts.

As a middle school principal in my years of service in my previous school district, Jefferson, this is precisely what we experienced. In order to make our budget, we had to cut staffing, eliminate curricular offerings, freeze wages, increase class sizes, defer maintenance to future years, and other very difficult decisions. Later, during my years as a high school principal and then superintendent of the same school district, we put tremendous effort to change culture and set goals to turn the trend around. We did so successfully! The net loss of students became a large net gain, thereby assisting our financial woes in a very positive way.

Fortunately, Yorkville is not experiencing this difficulty. Admittedly, schools operate more like a business than they did in the past, largely due to competitiveness in open enrollment.  

The state funding formula sends $8,224 per K-8 student, and $4,083 per 4k student, to Yorkville for each child choosing to open enroll to us. Conversely, we send the same amount per student, residing in Yorkville, and choosing to attend public schools elsewhere.

In Yorkville, the largest annual expenditure is the salaries, wages, and benefits to our employees. This constitutes about 66% of our total budget. This percentage is very common from school district to school district. In fact, this percentage is reportedly very typical among many lines of work, ranging from hospitals to small businesses, and law firms to grocery stores.  

Over my three plus decades as a public educator, most of which has been serving as a principal or superintendent, I have learned it is common for many to think that middle/high school sports might rank the second largest categorically in school budgets. In reality, the second largest for most districts are either open enrollment, maintenance, or transportation. Open enrollment, as an expenditure, ranks high only for those districts with the aforementioned net loss in students.

You might be surprised that when referencing the table above, that we do have 31 students residing in Yorkville choosing to attend a public school other than Yorkville. This number is higher than I would have expected, and a number for us to keep an eye on. When studying these specific students, we have learned that to the best of our knowledge, not one of these students has ever walked our hallways.  

It can be assumed that they were not necessarily disgruntled with Yorkville School and left, but rather never attended here in the first place. The most common examples are as follows:

• Child lives in Yorkville School District but their parent works at a neighboring school and thereby chooses to have their child attend school where they work.
• Child lived in Union Grove, attended Union Grove Elementary, then parents moved residence to Yorkville, but wanted to maintain consistency in their child's schooling. Therefore, they open-enroll to remain at the school they had been attending. Union Grove is just one example.

For Yorkville, our second largest expenditures are maintenance (supplies, utilities, and projects). Projects include items such as repairing windows, painting, addressing ventilation issues, resurfacing and painting parking lots, and much more. Information technology, transportation, and curriculum also rank high for Yorkville.

We are hopeful that parents, property owners, taxpayers, and local business owners are happy to hear this news. It is important that your local school operates as good and transparent stewards of your hard earned tax money.

In 2021, about 34% of our 4K-8 grade students open-enrolled into Yorkville School.  This percentage is trending upwards.  It is reasonable to project we will experience 50% within the next five to seven years.

In addition to the financial support open enrollment provides Yorkville, there are curricular, co-curricular, and class size implications as well.

Most of the schools across Wisconsin are experiencing declining enrollment.  There are simply fewer and fewer babies born and as a result, this impacts enrollment.  Yorkville is no exception to this trend.  When student enrollment decreases, staffing decreases.  When staffing decreases, a wide range of course offerings, extended learning opportunities, and after school programming decreases.  This all affects kids and learning.

It may be counterintuitive, but accepting open enrollment students may help us with class sizes.  The Board of Education in Yorkville has listened to parents and values small class sizes.  The student to teacher ratio is small in comparison to many elementary schools.  Here is an example of how open enrollment helps:

• We have 44 fifth graders this year.  This equates to two teachers, each with 22 students.
• In the fifth grade, 16 students are open-enrolled into Yorkville.  If we did not have these students, our fifth grade would consist of 28 students.
• This means that each teacher would have 14 students.  When considering the dollars that we would not be collecting through open enrollment, it is difficult to justify paying for two teachers.
• This could result in one fifth grade teacher with a class of 28 students.

In this scenario, the number of students open-enrolling into Yorkville helps keep our class sizes low.

I am hopeful this newsletter was informative.  Any feedback would be helpful.  My email address is [email protected] and I would appreciate hearing from you.  Any further questions or discussion is welcomed.