Crossing the enrollment line

COEUR d’ALENE — Participating in afterschool activities and sports in Coeur d’Alene schools is a high point in education for Kassi Folberg’s three children.

The Folbergs live in an area of Hayden that is zoned for the Lakeland Joint School District and have attended schools within the Coeur d’Alene district for the last five years.

Folberg said her elementary school-age children enjoy walking a stone's throw away from home to Atlas Elementary each morning. Each year, Folberg has filled out an open enrollment form, which was then approved by Coeur d’Alene school officials allowing her to send her children across the school district boundary line for their education.

But, Folberg recently learned that the open enrollment application for two of her three children was denied.

“They’re being forced to go to a place where they don’t even know anybody,” Folberg told The Press. “We don’t even live close to Rathdrum. How are we supposed to be part of a community now?”

When they learned they would be going to school in Rathdrum next year, Folberg said her children were shaken and advocated for a move so they could stay in Coeur d’Alene district schools.

“They’re very upset,” she added. “To uproot them and move them to a school where they don’t know anybody ... I just don’t understand it.”

Tightening the existing open enrollment policy has become a prominent topic of discussion as Coeur d’Alene School District officials and trustees examine the expanding student population. Superintendent Matt Handelman told The Press that, although district officials have to look at the issue with a wide scope, the fact that each of the district’s 407 students who use open enrollment each have their own stories and situations is not lost on him.

“Your heart goes out to them and that’s why we’ve always tried to keep them,” he added. “But, those folks certainly don’t have an entitlement to a spot in our school district.”

A possible solution

The Coeur d’Alene School District has a long-standing open enrollment policy. Parents wishing to send their children to a school in the district through the policy must choose a school and submit an annual application to district officials.

Priority is given to out-of-district students whose parents work for the district, have a sibling enrolled at their school of choice, and to those who have “a unique situation or extraordinary circumstance.”

“There are families who have been going to the district for a long time and contribute to the district,” Handelman said.

The program has been beneficial to the district, Handelman said, because it allows schools to receive additional state funding for each out-of-district student. It also allows for the district to reach classroom capacities and maximize use of its personnel.

“When you staff tightly and you’re really trying to squeeze everything out of your budget, you don’t leave classes with 21 students instead of the 25-student cap,” Handelman said. “It would be nice to do that, but the reality is we are not funded in order to do that.”

There are more than 10,000 students in the Coeur d’Alene School District and, according to Handelman, students within district boundaries must be prioritized. Growth in the northwestern portion of district boundaries has increased the population substantially, leading some school officials to lean toward a temporary halt to open enrollment.

“While the out-of-district kids would help some of that (overcrowding), I don’t think there’s quite enough of them to solve the problem,” Handelman said. “There’s no grade level that has the out-of-district enrollment where, if you removed those students, you could lessen the number of classes per grade level.”

Different districts, similar opportunities

There are 62 students attending schools in Post Falls through that district’s open-enrollment program, the majority of which (42) live inside the boundaries of the Coeur d’Alene School District. Parents of a student living outside the district can apply for their child to attend any public school in Post Falls, and are accepted as long as they meet district standards and guidelines.

“The way we set it up is that we are not going to accept open-enrollments if they’re going to cause us a hardship,” said Post Falls School District Superintendent Jerry Keane. “That limits the amount of impact, and also provides some flexibility for the families in our three (school district) communities.”

Post Falls has had the same open-enrollment policy for more than 20 years, according to Keane. The policy, he added, allows the district to manage requests in an equitable way, while ensuring that schools aren’t negatively impacted by a dramatic influx of students.

“Those students end up being a small percentage of our overall student population,” Keane said. “It’s not impacting what’s going on here very much.”

However, Keane said there would be a significant impact if the Coeur d’Alene School District did decide to stop its open-enrollment program, and his district received 275 more students next fall.

“If it were to happen overnight it would be a problem, there’s no doubt about that,” he added. “But, with open enrollment, what you don’t know is if they were already enrolled in a public school, or if they were home-schooled — you don’t know where they’re coming from.”

At the Lakeland Joint School District, the majority of students attending schools that live outside district boundaries come from Bonner County. Superintendent Brad Murray said that, although the district is closed to open enrollment, families can choose to send their children to one of its schools if they agree to pay a $40 per month tuition fee.

“We figure that what parents pay outside of the district is equivalent to what property taxes would be over the course of the year for folks inside the district,” Murray said.

According to Murray, families that live just north of Spirit Lake often choose to pay the tuition fee instead of sending their children to schools that would require much longer commutes. The district’s policy, he added, has worked efficiently for decades without any major negative impacts.

“Before we admit any new out-of-district kids, we look at the numbers and make sure that the kids within the district are being served first,” Murray said. “But, once they’re in the district, they’re our kids and we want to treat them as such.”

The Press asked Murray if his district would be negatively impacted should the Coeur d’Alene School District make a decision that would send 97 additional students to Lakeland schools next year.

“It really just depends on what grade levels and what schools they go to,” Murray responded. “In some schools it could certainly have a positive impact and in others it would be a negative one.”

A different way to do business

One of the most frequent questions Handelman said he fields on the topic of open enrollment relates to the district’s two magnet schools, Sorensen and Ramsey. The elementary schools are attended by 111 students living outside the school district, 83 of which go to Ramsey, making them the elementary schools with the largest populations of out-of-district students.

There is a perception, Handelman said, that students who live within district boundaries are stuck on waiting lists to get into the two magnet schools because of their large populations of students from outside district boundaries.

“But it’s not just a perception,” he added. “To a certain degree, it’s a reality.”

Handelman said that an examination of how the two magnet schools were created is necessary to understand the situation. Sorensen in particular, he said, became a magnet school as a way to attract more students when the student population got to the point where closing the school entirely was likely.

“It was a dying school,” Handelman said. “There was a directive from the board at the time that, to keep the school open, everyone needed to be included.”

That history, he said, created a “come one, come all” attitude and gave more leeway to administrators when it came to open enrollment. Parents of out-of-district students at magnet schools do not have to reapply for admission each year — a requirement for other schools in the district — and any siblings of the student also have prioritized admission.

“So an out-of-district sibling would have priority over an in-district student,” Handelman said.

Overcrowded schools have created a need to change that policy, and Handelman said he has been working on the issue throughout the year with administrators at the magnet schools.

“We can’t keep doing business the same way,” he said. “We have to give the principals at our magnet schools the same ability other principals in the district have to say, ‘We don’t have room for you this year.’”

On Wednesday, the Coeur d’Alene School District Board of Trustees will conduct a workshop focusing on the open enrollment policy and procedures. According to Handelman, the working meeting could see trustees further examine waiting lists for the district’s magnet schools, students who are forced to transfer to schools they aren’t zoned for because of crowding, and tightening the overall policy.

Handelman added that he has warned the trustees about completely eliminating open enrollment because there could be times where it is beneficial to bring in students.

“But the board doesn’t seem to be talking about changing the policy,” he said. “They’re saying, ‘We need you to more strictly enforce this and, when there’s no more space there’s no more space.”