An analysis by advocates for Milwaukee's school voucher program suggests that long-established schools could lose hundreds of seats, disrupting upwards of 4,000 families, if state officials impose the rationing plan they have proposed for the program.

"I have no doubt that if this goes into effect, some schools will close," said Susan Mitchell, the president of School Choice Wisconsin. She added: "My own opinion is that we would be talking about dozens of schools."

Her organization used enrollment figures from this year to calculate how many seats individual schools would have lost this year if rationing using the proposed formula had been in effect. It shows that Messmer Catholic Schools would have lost 248 seats; Holy Redeemer Christian Academy, 161; and Urban Day School, 225.

State Department of Public Instruction officials agreed Wednesday that the plan they proposed could have the effect envisioned by Mitchell's group. They said the proposal does not distinguish in rationing seats between long-standing, top-performing voucher schools and proposals from people with, at best, dubious credentials who apply for next fall but have no realistic chance of opening.

Last week, DPI said a rationing plan will be imposed for the 2006-'07 school year for enrolling students in more than 120 schools in Milwaukee's private school voucher program unless Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and Republican legislative leaders reach an agreement on how to avoid that. The controversial voucher program has hit the legal cap on its enrollment of about 14,500.

School Choice Wisconsin calculated the number of seats that schools would have been given last year had rationing been in effect, and compared that number to the schools' enrollment this fall for its analysis. Eighty-two schools would have had to cut seats - a couple by more than 50%. Forty-four schools would not have been affected by the rationing.

"Clearly this raises all sorts of issues" for many of the schools, Mitchell said. "Do you stop offering a certain grade? Do you take some students out of every grade?"

Democrats push accountability

While advocates such as Mitchell are pushing Doyle to lift the cap on the program, Doyle and Democratic lawmakers fired back that no compromise will be reached without greater accountability for the schools in the program.

"To the extent that accountability and transparency is not taken care of, we will still have schools that are weak, and some of them troublingly weak, that we don't have any information about," said state Rep. Pedro Colón (D-Milwaukee). "Good schools will have to realize that if they want to continue to grow and prosper, they are going to have to have more transparency, because we have to start figuring out which of these schools do deserve funding, and which ones don't."

Denise Pitchford, the executive director of the CEO Leadership Academy, a voucher school, said rationing "could pretty much close us down," since 98% of the school's students participate in the voucher program.

Doyle said Wednesday that a compromise lifting the cap on choice students could be negotiated "very, very easily" if lawmakers from areas outside Milwaukee were serious about doing so. Doyle's own proposal would lift the cap on the program from 15% of Milwaukee Public Schools enrollment to 18%. It would also give preference in the future to current students and their siblings, ease the financial burden choice puts on MPS, and require private schools to get accreditation and take part in the state standardized testing system.

State Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Berlin), chairman of the Senate education committee, said that if people in both parties really want a solution to the voucher cap issue, one will be found, but probably not until the last possible minute. He said some parts of Doyle's proposal appeared acceptable and some not, but that introduction of a Milwaukee education bill by Doyle - expected to come soon - would at least be a starting point for legislative action.

"Uncertainty is not a good thing in education," he said, agreeing that the situation was very uncertain now.

DPI officials say that, although the voucher program's cap would be reduced only by about 250 for next year - from 14,751 for this year to about 14,500 - the effect on individual schools could vary widely.

The reason is that a key factor in the formula is the number of voucher students each school applying to be in the program says, as of Feb. 1, it has the capacity to admit for next fall. In the past, those numbers have been very different from the reality of September enrollment. For one thing, individuals or organizations applying to open schools can claim as many seats as they want, even though few of those schools actually open in the following fall and almost all enroll fewer than they claim.

The effect could be to allocate large numbers of seats to schools that don't exist or don't need the seats and to take away seats from some of the most solid schools in the voucher program, three DPI administrators agreed Wednesday.

Formula outlined

Here is how the rationing formula proposed by DPI would work: The number of potential voucher students listed in the Feb. 1 applications would be totaled. The cap total (14,500) would then be divided into the total potential seats, yielding a fraction. Every school would then be allotted that fraction of the number of voucher seats it told the DPI it could take.

The applications submitted last Feb. 1 called for 29,266 potential voucher students for this fall. That was roughly twice the actual cap, so if the formula had been applied to the current school year, every school would have been allotted about half of its claimed seats.

But about 45 of the applying schools on that list of 171 never actually opened, accounting for more than 5,500 of the total seats. And only six of the 171 schools had actual enrollment of voucher students in September that matched or topped the number they gave the DPI.

Brian Pahnke, an assistant state superintendent of schools who oversees the voucher program, said there was no way in the formula to distinguish between, say, Messmer Catholic Schools, which said it could take up to 993 voucher students in kindergarten through 12th grade and actually had 761, from "Elijah's Brook God's Nation Children School," which said last February that it expected 350 students and never opened. The rationing fraction would have been applied to each equally, even though that would have resulted in a sharp cut in seats at Messmer and allowing the other school to have perhaps 175 seats.

Pahnke said there was nothing DPI could do to check if the numbers being claimed in this year's applications are realistic or to prevent schools from playing games with how many seats they claim - other than that eventually they could not put more kids in a building than an occupancy permit allows.

Mitchell said School Choice Wisconsin is telling schools to be careful and honest in the numbers they submit.

Pahnke said about 40 people or organizations have been in touch with DPI so far about applying to join the voucher program for next year. He said that it was possible that at an unknown time, perhaps after the school year started in September, DPI would reallocate unused voucher seats if actual enrollment fell below the cap because of the impact of the formula. But he said he had no idea at this point how that would be done. It is possible, he agreed, that large numbers of children would change schools after the school year had begun, including students enrolled in Milwaukee Public Schools.

Steven Walters of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.