Charter school enrollment grows in Utah as some schools top state rankings

When Megan Judkins’s eldest son Zachary was in sixth grade, she and her family had to make a choice about where he was going to attend junior high — a larger public school, or a smaller charter school.

Given her son’s interest in computer science, she decided to enroll him at Beehive Science and Technology Academy after meeting with school faculty and staff.

“Over the years, I’ve had the principal Mr. Oguz in my home; I’ve had a couple of different counselors, the art teachers,” said Judkins, who now has four kids at Beehive. She’s gotten to know them, and they’ve gotten to know her children, “on a personal level that you don’t get in a lot of the bigger schools, like in a big public school.”

Beehive has topped U.S. News and World Report’s list of best Utah high schools the past few years, with charter schools overall dominating the top spots. And while enrollment between charter schools and school districts has fluctuated since 2018, charters have seen growth in the past year — with projections predicting even more — as new charters pop up around the state, such as John Hancock Charter School’s new Eagle Mountain campus.

In 2022, charter schools gained 975 new students, according to Utah State Board of Education records, while school districts lost 562 students. This year, the board projects charters could see about 334 new students in October, with districts statewide expected to lose an estimated 244 students.

That projected growth makes sense to Royce Van Tassell, executive director of the Utah Association of Public Charter Schools.

“Parents still want to have the more personalized local relationship that a charter school usually can offer, as opposed to a district that’s got 10,000, or 30,000, or 50,000 [students],” he said.

He added that, despite recent charter school growth, he understands that some school districts continue to grow, too, even as enrollment in other districts remains the same, or shrinks.

“In some ways, that reflects what a given school or school district provides,” Van Tassell said. “And in some ways, it just ends up reflecting the cost of housing.”

Why does enrollment between charters, districts fluctuate?

Each time school districts have grown since 2019, charters have lost students — and vice versa.

That fluctuation likely has a lot to do with where people are moving their families, Van Tassell said. Some areas of the state are getting smaller, while others, like where Van Tassell lives around Eagle Mountain, seem to be growing, he said.

“I’ve watched this for 20 years. Young families, they come and live around me and my wife because that’s where you can afford to buy a house, and so you see significant growth,” he said. “You see the same thing happening on the west side of Salt Lake County.”

It’s also possible that the COVID-19 pandemic affected enrollment across the state, Salt Lake Education Association President James Tobler said, especially as some parents did not agree with certain precautions different districts took.

“I know during COVID, in our districts, we had a mask mandate,” Tobler said. “And some parents were not comfortable with that, and took their students and went somewhere else.”

During the height of the pandemic, school districts lost 2,419 students in 2020, while charter schools gained 1,625, according to USBE data. The next year, districts saw a wave of students newly enroll or return, growing by 10,107 students, while charter schools lost almost 1,500.

Charters offer choice, but lack equal oversight

Charter schools are a “great concept,” because they can specialize in certain topics, said Tobler, citing Salt Lake City public charters such as Open Classroom and Salt Lake Center for Science Education.

Tobler’s son previously attended SLCSE, and Tobler appreciated the emphasis on science and the education that the school offered.

But he remains concerned that certain charters aren’t as regulated as others, because they aren’t “held to the same standards of rigor, and don’t have a lot of oversight,” he said.

“At the same time, there’s some other public charters — they have boards of directors, and they hold themselves to a very high standard, so I think you see that whole spectrum,” he said.

A report from the Network for Public Education found that between 1999 and 2017, more than 25% of charters closed nationally after operating for five years, and more than half closed after 15 years.

As more charters open in Utah, some may be more profit-driven than others, Tobler added, especially as bills like HB215 — which gave students an $8,000 voucher to attend private schools — go into effect, diverting more money into private schools.

The bill was marketed by lawmakers as a way for low-income students to attend private schools, but Tobler said many such families still may not be able to afford tuition, leaving vouchers available to those who can already afford to attend.

“I think it has a pretty dangerous potential to unalterably change the direction of education in things in our state, and possibly the country,” he said.

Van Tassell said the benefit of charter schools is “choice.”

“You should be able to choose the school that meets your child’s needs,” he said.

That’s one of the reasons Judkins chose to send her kids to Beehive. Previously, her kids had attended Canyons School District and Granite School District, where she said she enjoyed the benefits a larger district brings, such as convenient busing to and from school.

But her kids all needed speech therapy, she said, and she felt that the district could not provide the same resources that Beehive ended up offering her family.

“I’m not trying to blame them or anything like that, but I just felt like, [at Beehive] I feel really supported,” she said.

And while Beehive also doesn’t have sports teams, it does have everything her children are interested in, Judkins said — robotics, computer programming, partnerships with Salt Lake Community College. And that works for her family.

“It kind of just depends on what your goals are,” she said.

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