The Open Enrollment Factor

Recently, the governor of Iowa signed into law a bill banning school districts from implementing what were known as voluntary diversity plans. Since the Waterloo Community School District had previously implemented a voluntary diversity plan, there are implications for Hudson that will result in enrollment growth. Generally speaking, if a student chose to open enroll into an Iowa public school district by the deadline of March 1, both the receiving and resident district had to grant that request. In the majority of cases, the receiving district could take action unilaterally to approve or deny that enrollment without regard to the resident district. Except that wasn't the case in school districts with voluntary diversity plans. Prior to this law being enacted, students from Waterloo were essentially blocked from open enrolling in Hudson Schools. Instead of the receiving district (Hudson) being allowed to take action, we had to wait until the resident district (Waterloo) approved the request. Most of the time those requests were denied. The idea behind these voluntary diversity plans was to maintain racial and socio-economic equilibrium in the district. 

Since I started tracking the data, the number of students open enrolling out of Waterloo into Hudson has dropped dramatically. My data set looks back to the 2006-2007 school year when we had almost 80 students open enrolling into Hudson from Waterloo. For the school year that just ended, we had 39 from Waterloo. By observing the chart, you can also see there are numerous school districts that contribute to our open enrollment 'in' number. When viewed in total, we number approximately 100. It is worth pointing out that we also had 46 students that open enrolled out of Hudson into other school districts. With an approximate 2:1 net gain, it is clear that Hudson is a beneficiary of the open enrollment laws.

Now that the law has changed and students are permitted to open enroll, the question becomes: how many can we expect? Well, at this point it is difficult to know exactly. To date, we have taken action on, and approved some 30+ requests to open enroll into our district. However enrollment is almost always a moving target and frankly we won't really know for sure until the first day of school. Even then we won't take an official tally until October 1st, which will solidify the number we use for our budget projections and five year enrollment forecast. 

Considering all of that, I think it would be premature to suggest a significant enrollment boom: at least in the immediacy. I do believe the growth will be steady, controlled, and manageable.

Keep in mind when we started the 2020-2021 school year, we experienced a decrease in enrollment of roughly 20. This was due largely to the pandemic. Some families elected to delay the start of school for their children or went the homeschool route. Some of those students we expect to return, others probably will not. Nevertheless, that prior year enrollment was used to model our current projection. As a reminder, my standard representation is based on the cohort methodology, which I would classify as a pretty rudimentary strategy. That illustration suggested enrollment of 726 for the 2021-2022 school year. The good news is that we are most certainly going to be above our original projection. How much remains an open question. 

When factoring in all the other known variables, at this point I can estimate that number somewhere in the vicinity of 757. To put that in perspective, it is just a handful of students above the 2019-2020 school year (which was an enrollment 'high water mark' over the last decade). Keep in mind that will change. We will certainly have some move ins, move outs, open enrollees who decide to stay where they are, and others that will still need to be approved or denied. After all it is only the first week of July! 

All of this has led to questions from some folks about whether or not we have enough room. The simple answer is that, yes we do. Further, the board has the authority to control the flow of open enrollment. Even though we are currently projecting enrollment higher than it has been in almost 15 years, we have plenty of capacity at this point. 

Our construction strategy has been predicated on enrollment projections that would enable the district to move from what has traditionally been three sections per grade level to four sections per grade level. In the elementary and junior high building we have largely achieved creating that capacity with the completion of renovations in our K-8 building. This was based on what we have been seeing in regard to growth in our residential population, that being the third addition at Upper Ridges and the Twin Oaks development that is geographically located on and to the north of Ranchero Road. 

We'll move on to planning for renovations to the high school in the next 12-18 months, which has been in the planning stages all along. The pandemic has pushed some of this planning to the backburner and we are in the process of building the financial capacity we'll need when the time comes to move forward. Since the majority of our new students are concentrated in the elementary school this fits into our plans quite nicely.  

Bottom line: It's Good to Be a Pirate!