Open enrollment is not one policy. It is four. State-by-state scan, August 2026.

Bottom line

Open enrollment is not one policy. It is four.

A red-green map of “choice” collapses four different rules: intra-district vs inter-district, and mandatory if capacity vs voluntary. Capacity posting and transportation/funding sit beside those duties. They are not a score.

This first release independently verified 16 of 50 inter-district cells and 7 of 50 intra-district cells against current statute. The remaining cells are labeled Not yet verified. Missing evidence is not zero, and it is not “no program.”

Kansas is the worked example. The Education Commission of the States comparison published March 8, 2022 still reads Kansas inter-district open enrollment as voluntary under an older agreement statute. Current law is K.S.A. 72-3123 (L. 2023 ch. 98; L. 2024 ch. 111), effective 2024-25: boards shall permit nonresident enrollment if open seats exist.

What this study measures

Unit of analysis: state statute and regulation as of 2026-08-29. Not student mobility counts. Not charter, magnet, or innovation enrollment unless a statute folds them into open enrollment. Not letter grades.

Four provision layers, kept separate:

1. Intra-district duty — none, voluntary, mandatory if capacity, or not yet verified.
2. Inter-district duty — same taxonomy.
3. Capacity posting — who must publish open seats, where, and how often.
4. Transportation and funding — who pays to move the student, and whether tuition is barred or state aid follows.

A district can be required to admit nonresidents and still not be required to bus them. A state can require a June 1 seat post and still leave intra-district magnets as a different local system. Those are different cells.

Start with Kansas, then look locally

K.S.A. 72-3123, effective school year 2024-25: “the board of education of any school district shall permit nonresident students to enroll in and attend the schools of the district if such school district has open seats.”

Capacity posting is not optional in the statute. K.S.A. 72-3123(c)(2) requires each district, on or before June 1, to publish open seats by grade and school building for the next year. Reason Foundation’s 2025 audit reported that Wichita Public Schools did not comply with that posting rule. That is documented noncompliance, not a missing requirement.

Transportation and funding are a third and fourth layer. Receiving districts are not required to provide transportation; they may furnish it if space exists (K.S.A. 72-3123(j) and 72-3124). Tuition is prohibited except fees charged to every student. Nonresidents count in the receiving district for Kansas school finance, except transportation weighting.

What Kansas does not put in that cell:

• Wichita intra-district magnets.
• Creative Minds, the district’s project-based microschool work.
• First-ring outflow to Maize, Derby, Andover, Goddard, Haysville, and Valley Center.

Those habitats matter to families. They are not the statewide inter-district seat rule.

Coverage, not a census of silence

Independently opened inter-district cells in this snapshot: AR (Mandatory if capacity), AZ (Mandatory if capacity), CO (Mandatory if capacity), DE (Mandatory if capacity), FL (Mandatory if capacity), HI (None), IA (Mandatory if capacity), ID (Mandatory if capacity), KS (Mandatory if capacity), MI (Voluntary), MS (Voluntary), OH (Voluntary), OK (Mandatory if capacity), SD (Mandatory if capacity), WA (Voluntary), WI (Mandatory if capacity).

Hawaii is None with a structural caveat: one statewide district, so there is no second district to receive an inter-district transfer. That is not a finding that Hawaii bans choice.

Alaska, Alabama, Maryland, and North Carolina remain Not yet verified. Older trackers list them as having little or no statewide open enrollment. This study does not promote a failed search or a 2022 exclusion list into None.

Illinois is also Not yet verified on the duty layer. The opened tuition section authorizes charging nonresidents; that is not enough to publish statewide “none.”

District of Columbia is scoped separately and is not one of the 50. Like Hawaii, it is a single-district system for this inter-district question.

ECS 2022 and Reason 2025 are not the public status layer

ECS’s 50-state comparison (published 2022-03-08) is useful discovery. It is not current law. CRS IF10713 (updated 2025-05-23) repeats those 2022 counts; that is not a 2025 re-tabulation.

Reason Foundation’s 2025 scoresheet measures a different construct: a seven-component checklist, not this study’s four statutory layers. ECS’s “24 states require inter-district open enrollment” and Reason’s “16 strong cross-district laws in 2024” should not be averaged. This page does not publish letter grades as ShowMeRob status.

Nine states were reclassified from a prior voluntary label to mandatory if capacity after the operative “shall” language was re-read: Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Iowa, Idaho, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Kansas is the tenth correction, against ECS 2022 rather than against that prior extract.

Reason 2025 also lists Arkansas, Nevada, New Hampshire, and South Carolina as 2025 improvers. Arkansas is independently verified here. Nevada, New Hampshire, and South Carolina stay Not yet verified until their current statutes are opened.

The 50 states

Methodology

Primary source beats a tracker. Current statute or regulation first, then 2023-or-later state education agency guidance, then ECS 2022 as discovery, then 2023-2026 session laws, then Reason 2025 as a conflict flag.

Taxonomy for intra and inter: none | voluntary | mandatory_if_capacity | not_verified.

Capacity posting, transportation, and funding are stored as separate fields. They are never collapsed into a heat map.

Missing coverage is Not yet verified. It is never coded as zero.

Limits

• 34 inter-district cells and 43 intra-district cells are not yet independently opened.
• The KSDE Open Enrollment Law Guide PDF was not independently opened for this snapshot. The statute text and the Kansas Legislative Research Department 2024-02-01 summary cover the same Kansas rule.
• Student-level transfer files are out of scope and are not published.
• This companion dashboard is standalone. It is not joined to the combined Research dashboard on this run.

Sources

• Kansas: K.S.A. 72-3123 and K.S.A. 72-3124
• Kansas Legislative Research Department, Unified School District Open Enrollment Statutes (2024-02-01)
• Education Commission of the States, 50-State Comparison: Open Enrollment Policies (2022-03-08; discovery only)
• Reason Foundation, Public Schools Without Boundaries 2025 (2025-10-02; discovery and conflict flag)
• Congressional Research Service, IF10713 (updated 2025-05-23)
• State statute URLs in the table above