Mapping Indiana’s K–12 Student Transfers

Earlier this year, the Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) released its first ever Public Corporation Transfer Report showing how many students in each district exercised public school choice in Fall 2017. I’ve used the data in that report to create maps that show districts where students have left their schools to attend a different district school, a charter school or a private school using public funds.

As a refresher, according to the most recently available data from the National Center on Education Statistics, some homeschooler estimates and my own calculations, 81.7 percent of Hoosier students attend a public district school. The remaining students pay for private school (8.7 percent), use a voucher or tax-credit scholarship to attend a private school (3.4 percent), attend a charter school (3.2 percent) or are homeschooled (2.9 percent).

 

Interdistrict Open Enrollment

For this analysis, I first examined students who left their district through “parent choice.” According to the IDOE’s definitions, parent choice includes “students with legal settlement in a school corporation who are enrolled in and attending a different school corporation based on an agreement between the parent(s) and the school corporation the student attends. The corporation of legal settlement is not a party to the transfer agreement.” In other words, these are the parents using interdistrict open enrollment to send their children across district lines for school.

 

The 289 public school districts in the transfer report had 52,052 students transfer out of their district school using interdistrict open enrollment.

Here are the top districts at each extreme:

[table id=57 /]

 

Charter Schools

The first charter schools in Indiana opened in 2002, and students gained the ability to transfer out of their zoned public school to attend a public charter school—44,112 students did so in Fall 2017.

Here are the top districts at each extreme:

[table id=58 /]

Only Cannelton City Schools, which happens to be across the Ohio River from my grandmother’s hometown of Hawesville, Ky., had zero students transfer out of the district to attend a charter school. For context, 261 students in the entire district attended the combined elementary and high school in Fall 2017.

 

School Vouchers

Students also are able to leave their resident school to attend a private school using public funds via Indiana’s Choice Scholarship Program. The program was enacted and launched in 2011 and is the largest single statewide voucher program in the nation.

Based on the IDOE Public Corporation Transfer Report, 35,500 students opted out of their resident school to attend a private school using the Choice Scholarship Program in Fall 2017.

Here are the top five districts where resident students left their district school and used a school voucher:

[table id=59 /]

Other than those five districts, only School City of Hammond (926 students) and Perry Township Schools (922 students) had more than 750 students leave their district school for a voucher school.

Twenty-three school districts did not have any  students leave to attend a private school using a voucher:

[table id=60 /]

 

Other Reasons

Finally, I examined the students who left their district for other reasons. These are, according to the IDOE report, “Students with legal settlement in a school corporation who are enrolled in and attending a different school corporation due to scenarios other than interdistrict open enrollment. Common examples include (but are not limited to):

• An agreement between the corporation of legal settlement and the servicing corporation,
• A “better accommodation” student transfer agreement under IC 20-26-11-5 between the corporation of legal settlement and the student’s parent(s),
• A “better accommodation” order by the State Board of Education,
• State obligations and
• A placement by county welfare offices, state courts, state licensed child-placing agencies, etc.”

 

Statewide, there were 3,676 students who transferred out of their resident district for one of the aforementioned reasons.

Here are the top five districts that had students transfer for other reasons:

[table id=61 /]

There were 12 school districts that did not have any students leave for other reasons:

[table id=62 /]

 

Collectively

Finally, here are the most and least populated districts, in terms of publicly-funded (district, charter and voucher) students living in the district, and how families are choosing:

[table id=63 /]

In rank order, here are the most popular ways students left their district school using public funds in Fall 2017:

1. Interdistrict Open Enrollment (52,052 students)
2. Charter School (44,112 students)
3. School Vouchers (35,500 students)
4. Other (3,676 students)

 

We also can break down that data as a percentage of the 1,139,822 students enrolled in Indiana in 2017–18 (according to the IDOE):

1. Interdistrict Open Enrollment (4.6%)
2. Charter School (3.9%)
3. School Vouchers (3.1%)
4. Other (0.3%)

In total, 11.9 percent of Indiana students used public funds to leave their district schools. It will be interesting to look back around this time next year to see how many of the above data points have changed. If I had to make an educated guess, I imagine public school choice will remain the top form of choice in Indiana for some time to come.

 

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