They say the best defense is offense. Perhaps the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has gotten that memo. As part of their legislative priorities for 2026, DESE and the state Board of Education (BOE) included the following: “The State Board of Education suggests that DESE work with stakeholders to examine best practices for voluntary public school open enrollment.”
For the past several years, the Missouri Legislature has considered letting parents choose a public school in another public school district than the one in which they live—also known as open enrollment. It seems that DESE and the BOE are preparing for the moment that the legislature takes another crack at this idea. And by preemptively adding the word “voluntary,”, they have signaled that they prefer a weak and less effective version of this policy.
Currently, there are sixteen states, including our neighbors Kansas, Iowa, Arkansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, that require all public school districts to accept transfer students, provided that there is an open seat available. According to the Reason Foundation, students using open enrollment accounted for about 7 percent of publicly funded students in those states. In other words, open enrollment doesn’t have a massive impact on the system, but it can be a game changer for the students who use it.
In states such as Ohio, which have limited open enrollment to only those districts that voluntarily agree to accept students, high-income suburban districts have declined to participate. Thus, kids in Ohio’s largest urban districts, such as Akron or Cincinnati, don’t have any feasible open enrollment options. They would have to leapfrog over the suburban rings that surround their cities.
Missouri was called out last year in a national study for having district lines that mimic old residential red lines. That legacy could be ameliorated by making those lines more porous and less exclusionary. Regardless of the executive branch’s stated priorities, let’s not start the conversation on open enrollment with an eye toward a weak policy.
