By Megan Kelley

Review Writer

Lake Orion Community Schools is one of the many school districts in Michigan that allow schools of choice (SOC) students.

During the Jan. 22 board meeting, board members approved allowing students from outside the district to attend Lake Orion schools for the 2020-21 school year.

The district has two variations of schools of choice students: 105c, which are students from surrounding communities; and 06 students, which are employees’ children, Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources Rick Arnett explained during last year’s SOC approval.

Michigan school boards must vote annually on whether they are going to allow schools of choice students for the upcoming school year.

Lake Orion caps its schools of choice enrollment at 10 percent for each grade.

In the past, Lake Orion schools have had their SOC enrollment capped at 10 percent.

SOC student data was pulled from the same time that resident enrollment data was taken earlier in the school year, Arnett said.

“One unique thing with schools of choice is those numbers will not go up as the year progresses because we don’t take on any more schools of choice students,” Arnett said. “Actually, they drop because we do have some schools of choice students who find other options, move, whatever the case. So, this is the highest number…they have since reduced (since student count day in October).”

According to district documents, the total SOC percentage among all six elementary schools combined is 9.29 percent, middle schools at 8.6 percent and LOHS is at 4.71 percent.

LOCS administration gave their recommendation that the district should continue in the SOC program for K-8th grade students.

“Are we talking percentage of total?” Trustee Jake Singer asked. “For example, one, we have 48 students that were SOC and there were 450 resident students so you put us over 10 percent. But that’s 48 out of 498 so we’re actually under 10 percent of students…I want to make sure that we’re not overstating that we are within 10 percent compliance when you look at the total population.”

“Just to clarify that,” Arnett responded. “We look at the resident enrollment when we do our projections and when we do a percentage we do overall enrollment, what percent of that is SOC.”

Singer added that should the district need flexibility on the 10 percent cap, he would like them to bring that forward to the board as a recommendation.

“The 10 percent target works out great because it bares repeating out the reason the board went into that was to most efficiently have our existing classroom capacity,” Singer said. “We’re not looking to build buildings we’re looking to fill the buildings we have.”