Two school districts in Northeast Ohio will be ending their open enrollment policies starting in the coming school year as they contend with budget challenges.
Starting in the 2026-2027 fall school year, students who live outside the geographic boundary of the Cuyahoga Falls and Norton school districts will no longer be able to enroll at those schools. Open-enrolled students who currently attend those schools, 252 at Cuyahoga Falls and 267 students at Norton, will also lose access.
Cuyahoga Falls Treasurer Kristy Stoicoiu said the state required the district to submit a budget reduction plan to avoid a deficit. The financial forecast it submitted to the state in November 2025 shows the district more than $2 million in the hole by the end of its 2028 fiscal year.
Stoicoiu said Cuyahoga Falls and other school across the state are grappling with a lack of state support for public schools, partly due to property tax reform bills and the state's approach to the school funding formula. Republican legislators argued after the current two-year budget passed that the state was still giving more support to public schools than the state ever has.
"This is probably the worst I've ever seen it, and I've been doing this over 20 years; they've really tied our hands. We don't have a lot of ways to get revenue," Stoicoiu, adding the district is considering a levy for the November ballot.
Ending open enrollment will allow the district to cut five or six staff, mostly teachers, to save money. The district is also closing an elementary school, joining other districts like Cleveland and Columbus in consolidating schools.
Superintendent Andrea Celico said the district did not want to take this step.
"It was very emotional. It's heart wrenching. And the reason is because it's impacting who we care about the most, right? And that's our students," she said.
Norton City School District's board also approved a budget reduction plan in December 2025 that calls for ending open enrollment. A fact sheet on the district's website said it's part of a broader plan to cut back its budget, which includes the potential for 25 to 35 staff layoffs.
The district said it lost $322,000 it funding annually in the state budget.
"At the same time, state funding increases did not keep pace with inflation. School districts continue to face rising costs for goods and services, and the gap between funding and inflationary growth has contributed to the fiscal challenges now affecting many districts," the district said in the fact sheet.
The end of open enrollment could be an unexpected boon for Akron Public Schools. Superintendent Mary Outley during her State of the Schools address Tuesday suggested "there's over 200 students hat could opt back into Akron Public Schools" from Cuyahoga Falls schools alone.
Not every school has open enrollment in Ohio. Some suburban districts like Avon Lake and Orange schools do not allow students from outside the district to enroll unless they pay tuition totaling thousands of dollars per year. In 2011, a woman was convicted for sending her kids to Copley-Fairlawn despite residing in Akron.
A Cuyahoga Falls City School District spokesperson said the district will be fully closed to out-of-district students next year: those families will not be able to pay tuition to attend next year. It's not clear if Norton schools will allow the option of paying tuition next year. The district in its fact sheet said it will need to manage class sizes with fewer staff.
Stéphane Lavertu, senior research fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy think tank, wrote in a 2025 article that lower-income students in Ohio are effectively "kept out" of higher-income suburban school districts that don't have open enrollment policies.
"District efforts to keep their schools exclusive and property values high mean they have strong incentives to keep out lower income kids," Lavertu wrote. "This is done by refusing to participate in Ohio’s open enrollment program and charging lofty tuitions to families from other districts."
