A new article in Education Week puts Florida’s new open-enrollment law in a national context, noting nearly half of U.S. states allow students to attend public schools across district lines.
Compared to most other states, the article notes, Florida’s school districts tend to be geographically larger. Transportation, both within and between districts, could pose a challenge for families who don’t have the time or resources to drive their children to school each day.
“If there’s no public transportation, then only the most-advantaged students are going to move,” said Lesley Lavery, an assistant professor of political science at Macalester College in Minnesota, who has researched open-enrollment policies.
Those factors especially could hinder parents in Florida, which has large districts that span the size of each county. Five of Florida’s districts are among the top 25 biggest nationwide. The Miami-Dade County school system alone stretches over about 2,000 square miles, and has 392 schools.
The new law does not require schools to provide transportation outside their districts, but schools can do so if they wish.
“Transportation is an enormous issue even under very normal circumstances,” said Ruth Melton, the director of government relations for the Florida School Boards Association.
An obscure provision in Florida’s tax credit scholarship law allows low-income families to receive $500 scholarships to defray the cost of transportation*. But the option is only available to children who want to attend public schools across district lines, and the number of children using them has often languished in the single digits.
Within districts, it will likely be difficult for the school system to provide children transportation to every public school they might choose under the new law. Charter schools, which are independently operated and can’t achieve the same economies of scale as districts, often have a hard time transporting their students to school in a cost-effective way.
This is an overlooked challenge for school choice, especially in states like Florida where conventional public transit systems are lacking. How can communities create transportation systems that accommodate the full range of education options? It’s a question worth asking.
Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog, helps administer the program.
