RACINE — When their alarm clocks go off on the first day of school most teachers and administrators have some idea of what’s in store for them.
They never know for sure, however, until just after the bell rings.
That’s certainly true in the Racine Unified School District schools where teachers and administrators have been faced with declining enrollment in recent years. Though Unified officials have said much of that decline comes from factors other than vouchers and open enrollment, those two state programs have drawn away enough students to significantly alter Unified budgeting.
Open enrollment math
When the district loses a student it means there is one less child to educate—perhaps even feed and transport—but it also means less money.
Each year the state tells districts how much state and local tax dollars they can spend on each child.
This school year’s revenue limit is roughly $9,733 per student, according to RUSD Deputy Chief Financial Officer Marc Duff. About 68 percent of the $9,733, or $6,664, comes from the state. The rest comes from local property taxes.
When a parent succeeds in pulling their child from a Unified school and open enrolling them in a school outside the district, the state will take the $6,664 they would have normally paid Unified in per pupil aid and instead cut an open enrollment tuition check to the school that child is attending. This year the tuition amount is $6,635.
“The state makes the tuition payment to the schools through our state aid payments,” Duff explained. “They deduct it from what we are owed from the state and add it to the schools that are owed.”
Guessing game
District finance staff try to predict how much state aid they will lose to open enrollment each year by counting the number of kids they know in September are open enrolled at a school in another district.
Based on those figures Duff has estimated that the district will lose about $7.9 million in state aid to open enrollment this year.
Head counts the district conducts on the third Friday of the school year indicate that 1,227 would-be Unified students are open enrolled at schools outside of the district.
That number could increase or decrease as the year continues, since students can choose to open enroll anytime during the school year. They can also choose to return to the district.
The district doesn’t find out its total open enrollment cost— how much state aid it actually lost from students open enrolling—until June 16. That’s after the school year is over.
“Last year I budgeted $7.4 million and the costs came in at $7.166 million. We could have used that $230,000 for teachers to reduce class sizes, fix buildings, or other district needs,” Duff said. “So, that is a frustration.”
During the 2003-2004 school year—five years after inter-district open enrollment began—the open enrollment cost for RUSD was $856,713. The per pupil tuition at that time was $5,446 per student.
Voucher losses
Vouchers — money the state gives to low- and middle-income parents to pay for their children to attend private schools — come with their own set of difficulties.
Since all the money goes from the state to the private school the student is attending, there is less math to do. But the district loses out both by not getting state aid for that voucher student and by being unable to count the voucher student when calculating its property tax levy.
The district’s property tax levy is based on the number of students enrolled at Unified schools. The state allows Unified to count students that have open-enrolled into another public school district, because technically those students are still Unified kids — Unified is just paying tuition to another district, Duff said.
Voucher students, on the other hand, are private-school students that receive state funding directly. They are not enrolled at Unified.
While the district estimates that about half of would-be Unified students using vouchers to attend private schools were never Unified students to begin with, each student that leaves the district to attend a private school comes with a loss.
The state revenue limit law cushions districts from the impacts of enrollment fluctuation, by allowing districts to base their levy on a three-year average of student enrollment, and there are other funding provisions to help ease the sting, Duff said.
In the end, however, losing more students to private schools will slowly reduce the amount of property taxes the district can levy, Duff said.
Voucher costs
More voucher students also mean more expenses for the district.
That’s because public school districts must provide transportation to private school students who need a bus to get to and from school each day.
Although the busing requirement has been in effect for years, long before the Racine voucher program began in 2011-12, more students attending private school means more bussing to those schools.
During the 2010-11 school year the district spent $817,979 on private school transportation. Last year that amount rose to $960,842. With inflation accounted for, Duff estimates that roughly $75,000 of that increase comes from having to transport more students.
This year the district’s busing costs for private schools is more than $1 million, Duff said.
“Because of the way the private school boundary is we actually have to bus kids to Shoreland Lutheran in (Somers),” he added. “We do receive some reimbursement, but it is not comparable to having a kid (in our own district).”
The district must also provide special education services to would-be Unified students attending private schools. That law was on the books prior to vouchers and federal government and local taxpayers help to provide funding for such services, but as the private school population grows, so does the amount of services the district must provide to schools outside the district.
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