Nearly 40% of Colorado public school students, more than 347,000 kids in preschool through high school, are opting to attend a different school than the one assigned to them by their home school district — a sign that Colorado families have a strong appetite for school choice decades after it was introduced in Colorado, school choice proponents say.
That’s a major finding in a report released Tuesday by conservative education organization Ready Colorado, which studied the migration of Colorado students to schools other than the neighborhood school their district designates for them.
The number of Colorado kids taking advantage of school choice across public schools — including district-managed schools and charter schools — has mostly been on a steady incline in recent years, jumping more than 6 percentage points since the 2016-17 school year, according to the report. And the growing popularity of school choice isn’t limited to the most densely populated parts of the state as some rural families also flock to schools or online programs as an alternative to their default school in their district.
“I think it makes clear that it’s not a fringe issue anymore, that it’s how families are navigating the public education system in our state,” Ready Colorado President and CEO Brenda Dickhoner told The Colorado Sun. “It is ingrained in our ecosystem, that it’s natural for parents to say, ‘Hey, let me consider my options and think it through.’”
Colorado has long been recognized as a school-choice friendly state and was among the first wave of states to usher in charter schools in the 1990s. Charter schools are public schools that are managed by nonprofits that establish a performance contract with a school district, which serves as the authorizer. The contract gives charter schools more flexibility than traditional public schools over how they educate children, but they are still subject to the same standards and assessments as traditional public schools.
Colorado parents can also choose to enroll their child in an online school or, through the state’s open enrollment policy, send their student to a different traditional school in their district or to a school across district lines so long as that school has room for them.
Ready Colorado’s report, which analyzed data from the Colorado Department of Education, found that while the majority of parents are keeping their child in their default school, the number of students making the leap to either another school in their district or in an entirely different district altogether is on the rise. Most of those students end up at a school that is still in their home district — about 16% of Colorado students attend a district-run school in their home district other than the one initially assigned to them. About 8% of students go to a charter school in their resident district and about 1% rely on an online school.
Meanwhile, 13% of Colorado students, about 118,000 kids, travel to another district for school by tapping into open enrollment.
Dickhoner said the plethora of school settings available across the state through charter schools, online schools and open enrollment “has really shifted the mindset from this default of, this is just the school that my kids go to because we live close to it, to which school will be best for my kid and what are the options nearby?”
The growing menu of school options also leads to better quality schools, said Bill Kottenstette, executive director of The Stead School who previously ran the state education department’s Schools of Choice Unit.
“When parents have greater access to options, I think schools respond by seeking to really highlight what makes their school valuable to a family,” Kottenstette said. “The benefit may be academic, but it may also just be model type. It may be clarity on the services that are available to the student and I think it fosters a level of responsiveness to the individual needs of students and families.”
What drives families to other schools — and where?
Families shift to different schools for a long list of reasons. Some chase a school’s strong academic reputation. Others may seek out a charter school that offers specialized programs in the arts or science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Some pinpoint a school because of its convenient location or because it can best accommodate their child’s learning needs.
According to the report, traditional public schools and charter schools in districts in metro Denver and urban-suburban parts of the state field the most number of students from other districts — including District 49 in Peyton, Denver Public Schools, Academy District 20 in Colorado Springs, 27J Schools in Brighton and Jeffco Public Schools.
Some of those same districts see the most number of students leave for other districts, including Denver Public Schools and Jeffco Public Schools. Meanwhile, Colorado Springs School District 11, Adams 12 Five Start Schools and Aurora Public Schools also lose among the most students to other districts, the report notes.
Mapleton Public Schools has long instituted a policy in which every parent must play an active role in choosing where their child attends school in place of zoning students for specific schools. The district, which educates nearly 7,100 students in Adams County, began prioritizing school choice about two decades ago as part of a district reinvention to better engage families and improve academic outcomes, Superintendent Mike Crawford said.
Parents can learn more about options across Mapleton Public Schools through the district’s Welcome Center, where specialists fill in families on the different schools and organize tours, and by exploring an online School Finder tool where they can search schools by program and grade level.
Families list their top three school choices in an enrollment application and the district matches students with schools by gauging space, open seats and a school’s capacity. Crawford said at least 95% of students land in their first choice thanks to staff who closely monitor numbers and trends across campuses.
Crawford noted that the district’s school choice model initially went a long way toward empowering parents to make decisions about their child’s education and empowering educators to find the best fit for their teaching style. Over time, that model has helped the district make gains with its academic outcomes, first with its graduation and dropout rates followed by college entrance scores and then growth on state assessments.
“I think parents and students and teachers respond well to choice,” Crawford told The Sun. “I do think it’s part of how they find their agency and it helps them think about how they work best, how they learn best.”
Families in rural stretches of Colorado can also enroll in schools and programs outside their designated school, but exercising school choice looks a lot different than in suburban and urban districts, said Denille LePlatt, executive director of the Colorado Rural Schools Alliance.
Options for rural students are more limited, LePlatt said, particularly since the K-12 programs within 73 of Colorado’s 146 rural districts sit on a single campus. Still, rural families do switch schools, she said, sometimes because they might live closer to one district over another or because they want an online education.
According to the report, districts with the highest percentage of kids coming in from another district are all in remote locations while most of the districts with the highest percentage of kids heading for another district — compared to their enrollment — are also rural.
LePlatt cautioned that because rural districts are often dealing with fewer kids, a small share of students coming or going has an outsized impact on overall school choice trends.
What gets in the way of some families using school choice?
Despite the traction school choice has continued to gain across Colorado, not every family can easily cast a wide net when weighing where to send their child to school, particularly families with fewer resources and those still learning English, the report notes.
Two chronic challenges continue to complicate parents’ ability to pick a school outside the one assigned by their district: little support for transportation, with many families required to figure out how their children will get to and from their selected school, and processes that often leave parents confused with scant details on all their schooling options.
The report offers up recommendations to fix both problems, including by citing examples of solutions in other states. Florida, for example, doles out travel stipends for students in grades K-8 who go to public schools outside their residential zones. Wisconsin reimburses parents who qualify for free and reduced lunch up to a certain amount in mileage costs.
Mapleton Public Schools in Colorado, meanwhile, covers transportation for all students living within the district to their school of choice, turning all its schools into what Crawford calls “regional bus stops” and shuttling kids of all ages together.
Other possible transportation solutions highlighted in the report include setting aside state grant funding and working with third-party transportation providers to connect more kids with reliable ways to get to and from school.
Streamlining where and how families learn about the variety of schools available for their students would also make the process of choosing and applying to schools smoother for families, the report states.
“Even before families apply for open enrollment, accessing reliable and easy-to-understand information remains one of the most significant barriers to exercising school choice in Colorado,” the report states. “For parents new to the K-12 system, from low-income backgrounds, or who don’t speak English at home, the process is especially confusing and often inaccessible.”
Parents interested in open enrollment must do a lot of their own homework to grasp what schools offer and when they must apply, with individual districts and schools operating on their own rules and deadlines.
Unlike other states, Colorado does not have one central location that houses information and applications for schools statewide. In Delaware, for instance, the state education department has a standard online and paper application form and information about the process of applying to other schools in one hub on its website. Minnesota offers one open enrollment application for kids wanting to enroll in a school in another district, according to the report.
Dickhoner, of Ready Colorado, sees a lot of room for improvement across the state’s public school choice system so that all kids have a fair shot at sitting in a classroom where they will learn best.
“School choice is here to stay,” she said. “And the question going forward is are we going to make it equitable and accessible for all families? And I think that is still a question mark because there hasn’t been a lot of movement on some of those tougher policy questions.”