These maps show the impact of educational savings accounts on Iowa's public schools

The Iowa Department of Education announced Jan. 29 that more than 16,000 students paid for nonpublic school tuition this year by using education savings accounts created under a law signed by Gov. Kim Reynolds last year.

The law, which supporters often referred to as "school choice" legislation, awards about $7,600 per student to Iowa families who are approved for a state-funded education savings account to pay for nonpublic school tuition and fees.

Supporters of the new law said it would allow parents more opportunity to send their children to a school of their choice by removing financial barriers.

The new data released last week indicates some parents are taking advantage of that option by shifting their children from public to private schools. Nonpublic school enrollment increased slightly more than 7%, or just over 2,000 students.

But the data also shows most of the education savings accounts, or ESAs, went to students who were already attending private schools.

• About two-thirds of students who used their ESAs this year had previously attended a nonpublic school, according to the Department of Education data.

• Another 21% were kindergartners just entering the school system.

• Only about 13% of ESA participants moved from a public school to a nonpublic school this year.

A map of the rate of ESA participation by resident school district shows nearly a fifth of districts with no ESA participants per 100 students enrolled in the public schools, many districts with a handful and a few pockets with heavier usage.

More: Which Iowa kids could 'school choice' help most? These 3 maps tell the story.

Few, if any, seismic shifts in either public school enrollment or enrollment at individual nonpublic schools materialized, according to the data.

Instead, enrollment dipped slightly at public school districts across Iowa and increased slightly among the state's private schools.

Just under two-thirds of Iowa's public school districts reported a decrease in certified enrollment from 2022-23 to 2023-24; just over two-thirds of the state's nonpublic schools reported an increase in enrollment over the same period.

In private school-heavy northwest Iowa, negligible changes to enrollment

Nonpublic schools educate a disproportionately high number of students in far northwest Iowa compared with other parts of the state.

In one example, more students attend nonpublic schools within the boundaries of the Boyden-Hull school district than attend the district's public schools.

In a subset of five school districts where more than 20% of students attend nonpublic schools — Boyden-Hull, MOC-Floyd Valley, Remsen-Union, Rock Valley and Sioux Center — about 17% of all students used ESAs to pay for nonpublic school tuition. That's nearly half of the area's nonpublic school students.

But despite 1,264 ESA participants within those five districts, public school enrollment declined by just 58 students across all five districts this year. Enrollment at the 12 nonpublic schools in the same area has increased by 71 students since 2021-22. (Data for 2022-23 was incomplete.)

Enrollment numbers in other private school hotspots across Iowa tell similar stories.

In Carroll, where Kuemper Catholic Grade School and high school account for more than 40% of the students enrolled within the district's boundaries, about a third of nonpublic school students utilized ESAs this year. The 367 ESAs in the district factored into an increased enrollment of 58 between the two Kuemper Catholic schools.

The public school district in Carroll, meanwhile, reported enrollment slightly under the projections calculated in May 2022.

But those projections had already predicted a small decline year over year. And missing enrollment projections wasn't uncommon: A majority of school districts had enrollments below what was previously forecast.

The Dubuque area, with its large Catholic presence, had more than 1,100 ESA participants from the three area districts where more than 15% of students were enrolled in nonpublic schools last year.

But like northwest Iowa and Carroll, shifts in overall enrollments at public and nonpublic schools were slight. Certified enrollment dropped by 89 students in all three public school districts — less than 1%, collectively. The nonpublic schools within those districts reported a total enrollment increase of 113.

Eight new private schools spring up in Iowa

The Department of Education data shows eight new nonpublic schools in Iowa — not counting name changes or schools that broke into separate grade levels — resulting in the largest net increase in nonpublic schools in the state since the COVID-19 pandemic.

None of these schools has much of a footprint yet. Just one, Strong Roots Christian in Indianola, has more than 100 enrolled students. The rest have fewer than 50.

Parents of students in parts of the state with no nearby private schools will have to wait to take advantage of the new ESA law.

Of those eight new schools, five are within school districts that already had at least one nonpublic school. The remaining three are in the Indianola and Johnston school districts — in the greater Des Moines metro area.

Large portions of Iowa, including much of the state south and west of Des Moines, have few or no nonpublic school options, effectively shutting out those regions from benefits of the ESA law.

That's demonstrated prominently on the map showing the distribution of ESAs by public school district in Iowa.

No students used ESAs in a swath of more than a dozen school districts in southern Iowa, spanning from Red Oak past Centerville. Nearly 20% of Iowa's school districts reported zero students participating in the ESA program.

How has the law affected Des Moines-area school districts?

In three metro school districts — Saydel, Urbandale and West Des Moines — more than 15% of students who were enrolled within district boundaries attended nonpublic schools last year. (In Des Moines, that number was about 8%.)

Like other areas with a higher concentration of nonpublic schools, public school enrollment decreased gradually and nonpublic school enrollment increased gradually in those three districts. But a relatively low number of families took advantage of ESAs to pay nonpublic school tuition.

For every 100 students enrolled in Saydel, Urbandale or West Des Moines public schools, fewer than five additional students participated in the ESA program. That's lower than most school districts with similar ratios of public to private school students.

It's lower than even some districts where there are no nonpublic schools (meaning students must travel outside of the school district to attend one).

One possible explanation: This year, current private school students in families with a total household income above 300% of the federal poverty guidelines were not eligible for ESAs. (Any student enrolling at a private school for the first time is eligible for an ESA, regardless of household income.)

Dallas County, which holds much of the Urbandale and West Des Moines school districts, is the wealthiest in the state, with a median household income above $90,000 — roughly the 300% cutoff for a family of four.

Other counties in the Des Moines metro area also have relatively high median incomes.

For these school districts, then, the next two years of ESA data may be more revealing than this year's. The income restriction is raised to 400% of federal poverty guidelines for the 2024-25 school year, and lifted entirely starting with the 2025-26 school year.

Tim Webber is a data visualization specialist for the Register. Reach him at twebber@registermedia.com, and on Twitter at @HelloTimWebber.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Iowa 'school choice' law: Who received state-funded ESAs in first year