The impacts and opinions of school of choice laws are mixed throughout Hillsdale County. Many parents celebrate the ability to choose to which public school they can send their children while many small school districts lose students and state aid, which increases with the school’s student enrollment, when larger districts with more resources send busses across traditional state lines to attract new students.
Michigan school of choice law, passed under Gov. John Engler in the early 1990s, allows districts to enroll students in contiguous intermediate districts or students in other districts within the same intermediate one. The law gives the students power to choose where they attend school, meaning schools with better academics or better advertising can attract students residing outside the normal public school enrollment lines.
In the roughly 20 years since the passage of school choice legislation, the number of Michigan public school students opting for school choice has risen to 23 percent according to a recent report by MLive.
According to Hillsdale Community Schools Superintendent Shawn Vondra, the number of families in the county sending their children to a school outside of their district of residence is higher than the state average.
“I think every school district is sending busses into Hillsdale,” Vondra said. “Maybe we need to do better advertiser, but I’m an educator. I teach reading, and writing, and math.”
The amount of public as well as public charter choice schools with a relatively small number of students — less than 10,000 — is putting a strain on some of the county’s districts. Considering school choice and the ease with which students can be bussed across district lines, the 304-student North Adams-Jerome district has to compete with the much larger 1,482-student Jonesville district for students.
According to 2016 Eidex numbers from Jonesville Community Schools, JCS gains a net 73.13 students from North Adams-Jerome, meaning they also receive an additional $539,543 in state aid.
Of all Hillsdale County districts, JCS has gained the most students, and state funding, than any others in the county. According to Jonesville Superintendent Chellie Broesamle, the district gets about half of its students through school of choice and the number of students coming to the district is continuing to grow.
“We’re really lucky,” Broesamle said. “People that graduate love the school.”
She said she believes the reason her district is attracting so many students is because it has a computer for every student, a college scholarship fund, and a new industrial arts program with an industrial robot, as well as milling machines.
In addition North Adams-Jerome, Jonesville gains a majority of its school of choice students from the Hillsdale and Litchfield districts, both of which it sends busses into.
“Quite honestly, I’d rather spend our time giving our children a quality education,” Vondra said.
While the Hillsdale district loses almost 300 students to Jonesville’s every year, its academic metrics are better. In 2016, Hillsdale High School was named a Silver Medal school by U.S. News & World Report. And according to statistics from the state of Michigan, Hillsdale High School tops the 74th percentile of high schools in the state, while Jonesville is ranked in the 29th percentile.
Vondra said he is focusing his energies on giving a good quality of education to students and does not worry about why so many students choose Jonesville over Hillsdale.
“We know what we’re doing and we’re doing a good job with it,” he said. “I respect that family gets to make those choices and has to make those decisions.”
Corey Helgesen, the superintendent of Litchfield Community Schools, which lost 120.92 students to Jonesville in 2016, also respects a parent’s right to take their child to a school outside of their district, but thinks busing across district lines hurts the smaller ones in the county. Litchfield Community Schools had 248 students in grades K through 12 last year.
“About 10 years ago the school choice window, where there used to be a gentleman’s agreement, was breached and buses crossed the line,” Helgesen said.
Helgesen said that when busses began crossing district lines it began a “cannibalizing civil war” in which “smaller districts began hemorrhaging to larger districts.”
Helgesen said his district used to have 700 students. But he also said that while his district has shrunk, it has recently improved test scores and additionally, with the help of federal grants, Litchfield has one computer for every student and science, technology, engineering, and math courses, similar to those found in larger districts.
“As a school district, our function is the district within which we provide education… we shouldn’t be breaching the borders of the students we want to be picked up,” Helgesen said. “We need to make sure that our school districts honor what our constituents expect of us.”
