The Wauwatosa School Board is scheduled to vote at its Jan. 26 meeting on authorizing up to 148 new students from outside the district to attend Wauwatosa schools in the 2026-27 school year after previously setting aside zero additional seats in the 2025-26 school year through the state process known as open enrollment.
The proposal, recommended by the district’s divisions of Human Resources and Pupil + Family Supports, would represent a policy shift after a one-year halt in new open enrollment admissions by the district. Administrators say resuming admission of more non-resident students is justified by available capacity at the district’s elementary schools and the increased funding the district would receive for each student.
“I've heard some people say, ‘well, wait a minute, last year you didn't take any seats. Why are you taking 148 this year?’” Superintendent Demond Means said Jan. 12 after administrators gave their recommendations to the board. “I think the board was very deliberate … in stating that this will be a year-to-year analysis of where we are.”
Based on average class sizes and the anticipated number of class sections in junior kindergarten through fifth grade, administrators determined they will have space to accommodate at least 10 additional students in each of those grades and in some grades about 30 or more additional students. No new open enrollment seats would be made available in the middle and high school grades, though all non-residents students previously accepted can continue attending those schools.
“When we looked at the number of staff members we have and the class size ratio we have … if we didn't take advantage of the opportunity to take more students, it would be fiscally irresponsible,” Means said. “We have the capacity to take these students without increasing class sizes or creating more cost to us.”
Some school board members emphasized that having a year without new open enrollment admissions gave the district baseline data that will help inform similar decisions going forward as it calculates future enrollment capacity.
“This was relatively new for the district to have this much data-driven decision-making on open enrollment, and I think it’s really improved how we go about making these choices,” School Board President Lynne Woehrle said at the Jan. 12 meeting.
All districts in Wisconsin are required to set the number of open enrollment students they will admit by Jan. 31 so families interested in applying know which seats are available. The Wauwatosa School Board will vote on the proposal at its meeting scheduled for 6 p.m. Jan. 26 at the Fisher Administration Building, 12121 W. North Ave.
School board meetings also are livestreamed, and the public has the opportunity to provide comments at the beginning of each meeting but not during the board’s discussion of pending votes.
[Update: After a lengthy discussion, the board voted 6-0 to approve the open enrollment proposal. Board member Heidi Bach was absent.]
Video is available here of the Jan. 12 open enrollment presentation by Sarah Zelazoski, chief of talent, and Luke Pinion, chief of pupil and family supports. A three-page executive summary is available here.
The Wauwatosa School District’s overall number of non-resident students had been declining for several years even before the board set the 2025-26 number of new admissions at zero. Information provided by administrators a year ago showed the total number of students attending Tosa schools through open enrollment had declined from 1,347 in 2019-20 to 1,098 four years later.
The district now has 858 open enrollment students and anticipates that 123 will graduate in June 2026, according to Director of Strategic Communications Jessie Tuttle.
At the same time, the state has gradually increased the amount of money each district receives for open enrollment transfers, now estimated at $11,000 per student for the 2026-27 school year.
School districts make a separate determination of how many open enrollment seats they can provide for students with disabilities, and the current recommendation is to maintain Tosa at zero seats for those students because of lack of additional special education capacity.
- David Paulsen, a Tosa East Towne resident and editor of Tosa Forward News, has more than 25 years of experience as a professional journalist. He can be reached at editor@tosanews.com.
