• Utah was historically one of the first states to adopt open enrollment, and according to multiple evaluations, it has a good open enrollment policy that can be made stronger in a few key ways.
• Utah can ensure that as many students as possible get a good education by eliminating discrimination and information barriers to open enrollment.

As the academic year begins this month, most students are enrolled in one of the state’s public schools. Some families may be choosing a public school through one of the oldest education choice mechanisms in the state: open enrollment.

Simply put, open enrollment policy helps families transfer their students to another public school that is not their geographically assigned public school. Policies vary, but that is the objective.

The existence of open enrollment policy raises an important question that we often fail to ask in public education: Why is assigning students a school based on their home address still the default option? Open enrollment is premised on the idea that parents should be able to apply their children to a public school of their choosing. Not all parents may get their student into their top choice, but the ability to choose ought to be available to everyone.

To many, this feature is a given – a common-sense policy – but it wasn’t always available. Utah passed its open enrollment law 34 years ago, in 1990. Today, it is not nearly as controversial as other types of education choice policies, like education savings accounts, tax credit programs or vouchers, but it is a key education choice tool nonetheless.

Here are some important facts about open enrollment policy in Utah, including areas for improvement.

Utah is a leading state in open enrollment policy

Historically, Utah was one of the first states in the nation to adopt open enrollment laws. The other early adopter states that passed laws in 1988, 1989 and 1990 were Minnesota, Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Ohio, Idaho and Washington. A lot has changed since then. Now, according to a 2023 report by the Reason Foundation, 43 states have some sort of open-enrollment policy.

Utah also generally performs well – with some glaring gaps that it needs to fill – on evaluations of its open enrollment policy. The Reason Foundation report says that Utah is one of six states that have four of Reason’s five components for a robust open enrollment policy, which include:

1. Statewide cross-district open enrollment
2. Statewide within-district open enrollment
3. Transparent reporting by the state education agency
4. Transparency in school district reporting
5. Free access (no transfer fee) to all public schools

What Utah lacks, according to that evaluation, is reporting of details from the state education agency (Utah State Office of Education).

In addition, a report from the organization Yes Every Kid – which seeks to diversify the approach to public education to meet the varied learning needs of students – evaluates state open enrollment policies on three criteria, which include:

1. Open enrollment is mandatory for public schools across the state
2. No criminal penalties against parents for sharing an address for school enrollment
3. Prohibits discrimination based on a student’s home address

Only Idaho meets all three criteria. Utah is one of 10 states in the report that meet two of the three criteria. The report notes that Utah lacks a prohibition on address discrimination in open enrollment decisions.

The topic across the nation

While most states have some form of open-enrollment policy, Reason’s state-by-state analysis shows that only 11 states nationwide have mandatory open enrollment policies. The Yes Every Kid report puts the number at 16 states. Regardless of these different evaluations, they highlight that there is room for more to be done on public education choice. For example, at the same time, 26 states have policies that allow public schools to charge tuition for those transferring, and only Idaho prohibits address discrimination.

Transferring students to another public school does have several downstream effects and considerations that states have to tackle. Issues like funding for the student once transferred, demographic makeup of schools that lose and gain students, the feasibility of transportation for parents who need it most, whether to prioritize different groups of students, and eligibility for extracurricular activity once a student transfers schools.

Areas for improvement

Utah’s policy landscape is friendlier than some to choice and open enrollment, but the Reason and Yes Every Kid reports note clear areas for improvement.

To make open enrollment more accessible and effective, Utah policymakers should broaden parent access to information about open enrollment in the state.

To ensure that students are not unreasonably denied an opportunity for a better education, Utah should make it illegal to discriminate in open enrollment decisions based on home address.

This, combined with what Utah is already doing well, could result in Utah leading out with perhaps the strongest open enrollment policy in the nation.