Voucher caps: the threat to MPS

The Department of Public Instruction has recently issued its rules for implementing the caps on voucher enrollments. These could have a devastating impact on MPS schools.

The rules ask each school to estimate its enrollment. The ratio of the cap to the total estimate is then calculated. This ratio is applied to each school's estimate to calculate the number of students that the school may enroll. This creates a huge incentive for schools to inflate their estimates.

Consider this example. Assume that total enrollment with no caps would be 16,000 students. Assume further that schools that would enroll half the students give an accurate estimate (8,000), the others inflate their estimates by a factor of three (24,000). The total estimate, 32,000 is divided into the cap of 14,500 to give a factor of 45%. The schools that exaggerate their enrollment are allowed to accept 10,875 students, but only 8,000 enroll. Those giving an accurate estimate have a cap of only 3,625, forcing them to reject 4,375 potential students.

It is likely that many of these rejected students will enroll in MPS but remain on the schools' waiting lists. Presumably, shortly before the start of school the DPI reallocate unused spaces to the schools with waiting lists. In this scenario almost 3,000 students could make a last-minute switch from MPS to a private school. But MPS school budgets are largely dependent on enrollment, so they would be faced with severe last-minute budget cuts.