Public v. Public: Examining How Inter-District Transfer Policies Shape Superintendent Navigation of Rural District Boundaries

• In Event: Setting Boundaries: Exploring Policy Implications of Rural Locale Classifications and School District Borders

Abstract

Objectives & Background

The marketplace in education has expanded greatly, providing parents with multiple schooling options for their children. While this expansion has taken place across the nation, one can argue that it has exploded in Indiana due to open enrollment policies (Author, 2024), with intra- and intra-district public school choice serving as the largest form of choice in the state (Catt & Shaw, 2019). This paper examines how inter-district public school transfer policies in Indiana potentially reshape the ways rural education leaders navigate district boundaries and fiscal decisions.

Indiana’s open enrollment policies allow students to transfer to another public school inside or outside their residential district boundaries (Indiana Attorney General, 2022). With private and charter school options lacking across rural Indiana, this form of inter-district school choice has expanded the rural choice market. Additionally, across the state, “money follows the child” (Hirth & Eiler, 2012), meaning that no matter which district a student legally resides in, the district educating the student receives state funding for that child. This combination of open enrollment policies and state funding structures has created an environment in which students are highly mobile, potentially shifting the way school leaders view students and state dollars in relation to district boundaries.

Data & Methods

Previous interviews regarding Indiana teacher salary legislation found that statewide open enrollment policies put public school district leaders in a position where they must constantly market and recruit to maintain and gain students to their district for state funding purposes. This current project builds on this analysis by conducting a mixed methods study rooted in the question: How do inter-district open enrollment policies shape the way rural school leaders navigate district boundaries and fiscal decisions?
This analysis begins with a statewide descriptive and spatial analysis of the 2023-24 Public Corporation Transfer Report, exploring trends in transfer patterns in rural districts across the state. Then, I select case study districts and conduct interviews with school leaders.

Preliminary Results
Utilizing NCES locale codes to categorize districts, analyses indicate that roughly 83% of rural public school students enroll within their residential district and most students leaving their residential school enroll in another public school. Within rural districts, there is no variation across fringe, distant, and remote districts. Despite lack of variation according to locale type, summary statistics display large amounts of variation regarding how many students stay in their local district. Select rural districts have as little as 35-50% of their residential students enrolled, while others maintain as much as 95% enrolled. Additionally, most rural districts lose 1.6 students to other public schools for every student they gain, with some districts losing as many as 11 students for every student they gain. How does this student mobility impact the budgetary decisions of school leaders? Case study analysis zooms into individual districts to explore how these inter-district policies shape school leader marketing and budgetary decisions within and outside their district boundaries. Initial conversations with school leaders allude to the ways in which district shape and proximity to neighboring school buildings may influence enrollment patterns.

Author

• Kristie LeBeau, Harvard University