A version of the following public comment was submitted to the Nebraska Education Committee on March 17, 2025.
Nebraska Legislative Bill 671 would make the state’s K-12 open enrollment program, which allows students to transfer to public schools in districts outside of their residentially assigned school districts, more transparent. It would require the Nebraska Department of Education to include the number of approved and rejected transfer applications in each district in its annual open enrollment report. This is a step in the right direction because including the number of approved applications illustrates the student demand for each district.
However, L.B. 671 could be improved. In addition to showing the number of approved and rejected transfer applicants, the report should also include the number of actual transfers received by each district. Moreover, the Nebraska Department of Education should publish this report on its website.
Currently, the Nebraska Department of Education’s open enrollment report is shared with the legislature but is not necessarily made publicly available. Publishing this report would put school districts’ transfer practices at the fingertips of families looking for transfer information and policymakers seeking to improve public schools for the state’s students.
Wisconsin and Oklahoma already publish annual student transfer reports showing similar transfer data to that proposed in L.B. 671. Notably, Wisconsin has published its report for nearly three decades, and state policymakers have used this information to improve existing transfer laws. For example, participation in Wisconsin’s open enrollment program, which allows students to transfer to any public school with an open seat, jumped by almost 20% after policymakers adopted a secondary application time period for transfers because the annual reports demonstrated a high demand for the program that couldn’t be served by one application window.
Adopting these types of detailed open enrollment reports in Nebraska would help create more opportunities to improve public school students’ transfer options and ensure that the open enrollment process is fair and transparent to all families.