Livingston Today

Michigan Superintendent of Public Instruction Michael Rice recently told the Michigan Senate that measures should be taken to prevent parents from moving their children to schools that offer an instruction model that they prefer.

Current programs permit students to enroll at nearby districts, instead of the district in which they reside, an option that is disproportionately favored by low-income families seeking a better education for their children, according to a recent blog post on the Mackinac Center for Public Policy website. When students change schools, foundation allowance funding through the state moves with the student to the new school.

But Rice wants the state to freeze enrollment to prevent families from choosing districts based on the instruction model a school has chosen in response to COVID-19.

“For a single year, we ought to freeze enrollment so that we mitigate the movement of children across districts, which I think is going to be greater than ideal anyway, given the pandemic,” he said, according to the Mackinac Center.

Rice also joined a group of education organizations in a letter voicing support for a plan that would prevent any change in enrollment from altering how education money is allocated. They advocate, instead, for funding to be allocated based on 2019 enrollment numbers.

Ben DeGrow, the director of Education Policy at the Mackinac Center, states that such a policy would functionally prevent new enrollment in online or other schools, since schools would have no incentive to take on new students while not receiving any additional funding for them.

“Attempts to restrict flexibility for parents during the pandemic will not help students learn, and they won’t deter some families from finding ways to provide school at home,” DeGrow states in a Mackinac Center blog. “These efforts will only heighten the frustration of parents and erode their trust in a system that seems more inclined to break than to bend.”