Gov. Cecil D. Andrus last week signed a measure making Idaho the sixth state to enact an open-enrollment law.
Under the measure, parents will be allowed to send their children to any school outside of their residential school district. Parents electing to do so will be responsible for transportation costs, however.
Idaho istricts will have the option of deciding not to accept students from other districts, but will not be able to bar students from seeking transfers to other districts.
The other states to enact open-enrollment measures so far are Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Ohio. Similar bills are pending in Washington and roughly a dozen other state legislatures.
One of the states moving on4open enrollment is Arizona, where the Senate late last month adopted a bill to allow parents to send their children to any school in the state, as long as the transfers would not significantly alter the racial or ethnic composition of either the student’s assigned or desired school.
Under the measure, students would be able to seek transfers if they were not enrolled in schools under a desegregation order. But transfers would not be allowed to result in any school losing more than 5 percent of its enrollment in any one year.
Until full implementation of the program, during the 1994-95 school year, parents in some circumstances would be required to pay tuition to a receiving school.
The bill was pending last week before the House education committee.