Fort Wayne Community Schools lost 13 percent of the students in its district to the voucher program in this school year. That’s according to a report by the Indiana Department of Education.
The data released Friday included numbers of students who lived in the district but no longer went to its public schools.
More than 4,700 Indiana’s Choice Scholarship vouchers were given out to students living in the FWCS district. That number was up only by about 40 from the 2015-2016 school year.
The numbers again confirm what they already know, according to FWCS spokeswoman Krista Stockman.
“The number of students getting vouchers does not correlate with our student enrollment. We didn’t lose students and the vouchers gain students.”
In other words, students living in the district going to private schools were already going to attend private schools before vouchers were introduced.
“This is a continuation of the state paying for students whose parents never intended for them to go to public school.”
By contrast, northeast Indiana’s rural schools lost far fewer students, both by number and percentage.
MSD of Steuben County lost five students through the Choice Scholarship, less than one percent of its district’s school-aged children. Whitley County Consolidated Schools lost two percent.
