EDUCATION

Borsuk: Under school choice, most St. Francis high students live somewhere else

Alan J. Borsuk

The view through the windows of the student cafeteria at St. Francis High School is terrific. You look across S. Lake Drive to an expanse of Lake Michigan. People pay large sums of money for homes with views like this.

That’s not why parents choose the school for their children.

There’s the academic program itself. There’s the sense of personal connectedness in a 540-student high school. There’s the safety and order of the school. There’s the hard-working staff. And there’s the fact — how do I put this diplomatically? — a lot of city of Milwaukee parents prefer suburban high schools.

Make no mistake, St. Francis High is a choice school. To a large degree, the St. Francis district, which includes two other schools serving kindergarten through eighth graders, is a choice district.

Just to be clear, despite the religious-sounding name, St. Francis is a public school district, located near Mitchell International Airport. The municipality has a population under 10,000. Many longtime residents no longer have school-age children and many young residents living in newer developments near the lake also don’t have school-age children. In other words, there is a declining number of kids who live in St. Francis.

How do you keep schools reasonably healthy in that case? Get a lot of kids from elsewhere to enroll.

Public school choice gets less attention and generates less controversy than private school choice. That’s understandable — using public money to support kids going to private and religious schools is a more dramatic matter.

But, like private school choice, public school choice is changing the school landscape across Wisconsin, and especially in the Milwaukee area. It is a big deal in its own right. In any school, enrollment connects to money, staffing, academic offerings and general vitality.

Some schools and districts are gaining and some are losing under Wisconsin’s open enrollment law, which, for almost two decades, has opened the gates to kids going to public schools outside their own district. (Open enrollment is free to parents and kids, except that they have to provide their own transportation.)

More than 55,000 students in Wisconsin used open enrollment in 2014-'15, compared to fewer than 33,000 in the three private voucher programs across the state that year.

In addition, public school choice is likely to heat up as an issue nationally. No specific proposals have been put forth yet, but President Donald Trump’s budget outline, released several weeks ago, envisions spending $1 billion to support public school choice. That may be a lot easier to sell politically than Trump’s support of private school choice.

(What impact a federal initiative on public school choice would have in a place such as Wisconsin, which already has so much, is totally a guess at this point.)

Open enrollment has a big impact on many Milwaukee area school districts. For MPS, it means more than 5,500 kids every day leaving the city to go to suburban and, in some cases, virtual schools. In some suburbs, it means higher enrollment by 10% or more.

60% live elsewhere

St. Francis is on the high end of the spectrum of impact. One piece of information drives that home:

Of the 540 students in St. Francis High, only about 40% live in St. Francis. Sixty percent live in other school districts, most of them in Milwaukee.

It is fair to say that even some of the kids who live in St. Francis are there by choice. About 150 St. Francis kids open-enroll into public schools elsewhere, according to Superintendent Blake Peuse. He said many of the outbound are students who never attended St. Francis schools — for example, kids from families that moved into the municipality from a nearby district and continue to go to their prior school.

Of the 440 students who have open-enrolled into the three St. Francis schools, 350 live in Milwaukee, according to MPS data. Most are in the high school.

There’s obviously a financial upside for St. Francis, but there’s also a downside. A resident student means about $10,000 to the district in state aid and property taxes. An open enrollment student brings $6,600, which is transferred from the student’s home district. That means a large number of students bring less revenue to the schools, which means a district that runs really lean, more so than public school districts generally. Reductions and changes in how business is done are annual events.

But the judgment of the school board and administration is that having the open-enrollment kids is better than not having them. It means more courses are offered, more arts and music programs, more Advanced Placement courses, and more tech and vocation-oriented programs, according to Peuse and Jonathan Mitchell, business manager for the district.

If the high school served only kids from St. Francis, "you’re talking a high school of 210 or so, so you’re talking a very small high school,” with a lot of reductions due to that, Peuse said.

Of course, the benefits of open enrollment can only continue if parents keep choosing St. Francis. Peuse said enrollment is looking stable for next year, but selling people on enrolling is a continual obligation.

But it’s a choice world in every sector of education now, which is especially true in the Milwaukee area.

“There’s a lot of choices,” said Mitchell, the business manager. “That’s the reality for parents right now.”

The view out the windows of St. Francis High is impressive. But more important is what you see when you look in: A school and district pushing hard to move kids forward, doing so with resources that are even tighter than public schools in general — and doing so in an environment in which they can only succeed if they convince parents and students from near and not-so-near that these are good schools for their kids.

Alan J. Borsuk issenior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette Law School. Reach him at alan.borsuk@marquette.edu.