Austintown studies open enrollment

By Ed Runyan

The school board has to decide on open enrollment by next week.

AUSTINTOWN — Superintendent Doug Heuer says Ohio needs to reform its method of funding public education, but until it does, school districts like Austintown need to make use of open enrollment to survive.

“Open enrollment puts schools in competition with each other, but that’s the only option schools have under the system in place,” Heuer said.

Heuer and several school board members met Tuesday with officials from school districts that already offer open enrollment.

Heuer said the board sought the meeting to gather more information before deciding whether to say yes to the option at the next regular board meeting, at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at Davis Elementary.

Heuer says he doesn’t know whether open enrollment will come to a vote that night, but he continues to endorse the option despite the overwhelming no vote the public gave the idea at a public hearing held last month. At the time, two board members opposed open enrollment, and three were undecided.

If the board takes no action next week, the option will be off the table for this year, he said.

Open enrollment is used in 74 percent of school districts in the state. But poorer districts chose the option more, Heuer said.

For example, among the 25 poorest school districts in Ohio, 24 of them have open enrollment. Among the 25 richest districts in the state, only four have it.

The difference between the richest and poorest districts in Ohio is striking, he added.

For example, 61 percent of the 100 richest school districts in Ohio are in eight Ohio counties surrounding the largest cities in Ohio: Cleveland, Columbus, Akron-Canton, Dayton, Toledo and Cincinnati, Heuer said.

“Wealth is concentrated in those areas,” he said, adding that this is the reason the Ohio Supreme Court has four times ruled that the state’s system of funding public education is unconstitutional because it provides unequal amounts of funding.

Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland has vowed to present an alternative funding system by March 2009, but it could still take years for that to be implemented, Heuer said.

Austintown is ranked in the middle on the wealth chart published each year by the Ohio Department of Education, Heuer said: 295 out of 612.

The district is anticipating a $4.9 million budget deficit for the end of the 2008-09 school year, because of losses in state funding due to the phase out of Ohio’s personal tangible property tax, loss of pupils to open enrollment and charter schools and increases in the cost of fuel and utilities.

Heuer anticipated hearing from officials from Struthers and McDonald on Tuesday night.

Mark Lucas, superintendent at Liberty since the start of this school year, was invited to the Austintown meeting but could not attend. Liberty started open enrollment for the 2004-05 school year.

Lucas, a middle school principal when the policy went into effect, said open enrollment doesn’t appear to have affected the Liberty district’s performance on state test scores as a whole.

Liberty’s 108 open enrollment pupils generate about $600,000 per year. As for concerns about open enrollment pupils causing disruptions in the school, Lucas said he has been happy with the results this school year.

The district has a policy requiring any pupil who has been suspended for five days or more to meet with the superintendent. So far this year, no such meeting has been required for any open enrollment pupil, Lucas said.

“That in itself speaks volumes,” he said, explaining that open enrollment students have had such meetings in previous years, and some have been kicked out for disciplinary reasons.

runyan@vindy.com