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Mountain Home Public Schools reported 17 students transferring out of the district and four transferring in at the school board’s Aug. 6 meeting. Superintendent Dewey told board members the numbers do not mean what they appear to mean.
Most of the students listed as leaving were not active Mountain Home students, she said. Several had never been enrolled in the district at all, and others had already gone inactive.
“They might have been homeschooled or might have been Virtual Academy,” Dewey said. “They weren’t ours to begin with.”
The quirk comes from how the state counts a transfer. A student who lives inside Mountain Home’s boundaries but is being homeschooled still belongs to the district on paper, so enrolling at a neighboring school triggers a transfer even though the student never appeared on Mountain Home’s rolls.
“If I had been homeschooled and decided to go to Cotter, but I live in Mountain Home, that would be a transfer,” Dewey said. “But they never would have counted on our enrollment to begin with.”
She declined to give the board a precise count of how many of the 17 fell into that category.
“I don’t have the exact number, and I don’t want to give you a number in case I’m wrong,” she said.
The larger gap runs the other direction. A board member asked whether the district can see students who leave for a virtual academy, and Dewey said those departures never touch the transfer report at all.
Students who leave for an online school are recorded as withdrawals and appear on a separate report, she said. That means the monthly transfer figure the board reviews in public leaves out one of the routes families are actually using.
The 17 who did transfer generally went to surrounding districts, Dewey said. One of them is already coming back to Mountain Home for its alternative learning environment.
A board member asked whether those families tend to work or live closer to the districts they moved to. Dewey said some of the moves had nothing to do with proximity.
Timing shapes the report too. Under state rules, families applying to attend a public school outside their resident district must file by a June 1 deadline with both the resident and nonresident districts, and a district can cap outbound school choice transfers at 3% of its student population.
Families who miss that window need a legal transfer instead, which requires approval on both ends. Dewey pointed to that distinction when the transfer list came up, noting that students moving through school choice would not have needed a transfer at all.
The backdrop is a state where leaving a public school has never been easier or better funded. Arkansas made its Educational Freedom Account program universal in 2025-26, opening the accounts to every K-12 student regardless of income.
Roughly 28,100 Arkansas students used the accounts for private school tuition last school year, and about 18,500 more received accounts to be homeschooled or attend a microschool. Homeschool families draw about $6,864 a year.
None of that shows up on a transfer report.
Enrollment itself is still climbing for now. The agenda listed 3,642 students, and staff said five more had enrolled by that morning, putting the count 92 above where it stood a month earlier.
Staff cautioned the figure will likely fall once withdrawals are processed, which usually shows up the following month.
The numbers matter beyond bookkeeping because state funding follows enrollment. The 2026-27 budget the board approved the same night counts about $450,000 in declining enrollment funding as revenue.
Dewey framed the transfer list less as a loss than as an opening.
“Lots of kids doing different things, but not necessarily ever were ours,” she said. “They could choose us, though, and that’s something to be aware of.”
The next transfer and enrollment report is expected at the board’s September meeting.
