This year, 20 Orange County Schools students' and their families did something that seems antithetical to attending a public primary or secondary school — they paid tuition.
OCS currently has 120 students attending their schools who live outside of the school system’s boundaries. Of those 120, 100 were the children of employees and did not have to pay tuition. But for the other 20, OCS charges a rate that’s comparable to the median funding they get per pupil.
“On a yearly basis, we bring before (the OCS Board of Education) our recommended tuition rate for students outside our system,” Superintendent of OCS Todd Wirt said.
This year, that was $3,868. Next year, it will be $3,991, a number that was approved at an OCS meeting on Nov. 6.
“We're always one year behind in what is recommended and presented in order to notify families, so that the tuition rate for the 2018-19 school year is based on the county funding for this school year,” said OCS Chief Operations Officer Patrick Abele.
The 120 students that live outside of OCS attendance boundaries are classified as “discretionary admissions,” one of two terms for students who transfer to an OCS school. The tuition-paying students came from Alamance-Burlington Schools, Caswell County Schools, Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools and Durham Public Schools.
"Discretionary transfers" are students who transfer from one OCS school to another. These students don’t pay tuition, and are much less likely to be the child of an OCS employee — there were 89 approved employee’s transfers and 832 approved non-employee transfers in the 2017-18 school year.
Transfers don’t just go to OCS — 53 students were released from the system, with 24 going to CHCCS.
Not every request to attend an OCS school is approved. Three discretionary admissions and four discretionary transfers were denied. There’s a combination of factors that go into these decisions, including siblings or parents at the school and the capacity of the school — some schools are closed to transfers because they are approaching or are over their capacity limit.
