Although his family lives in Niles, Keston McGuire started kindergarten this month in Edwardsburg Public Schools.
Keston’s mom, Kara McGuire, said she was attracted to Edwardsburg because of the broad array of programs, from traditional classes to those that are gender-specific or have kids of different ages. She was also impressed with the facilities, even the playgrounds.
"When we were walking out of our (school) tour, I looked over to the playground, and they actually put a canopy over part of it” to shield kids from the sun, she said. “This school system is taking its time to look at the details."
Keston is one of thousands of students in Berrien and Cass counties, and about 100,000 across the state, who take part in Schools of Choice, a program that allows Michigan students to attend public schools other than their own.
This ‘open enrollment’ concept, in which state funding follows students outside of their own districts, began just a few years ago in Indiana. But Michigan was ahead of the trend, establishing its program in the mid-1990s.
Districts can opt in or out of the Schools of Choice program, designate cut-off periods for enrollment and set aside a maximum number of seats at different grade levels for out-of-district students.
The philosophy behind the program was to foster school improvement and to increase competition among schools, giving parents the chance to send their kids to a district that best meets their needs — in other words, to go school shopping.
'A child's educational fate should be decided by caring parents, children and classroom teachers, not by lines on a map," the sponsor of the school choice bill, state Sen. Bill Schuette, R-Midland, declared in 1995.
But has it worked?
Anne Schieber, a spokeswoman with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a nonpartisan research institute, said despite the number of students who attend public schools as non-residents — the 100,000 represent 9 percent of all Michigan students — the academic outcomes of open enrollment haven’t been studied in depth.
What is known is that Schools of Choice has grown steadily over the past decade, and students who take part generally enter districts that are higher performing than the ones they leave, a 2013 study by the Mackinac institute found.