My daughter did two years of full time dual enrollment at a community college. All of her classes were free to us and book rentals were also free. The public school system didn’t pay anything for the classes - I don’t really know the details but it was all from a different source of state funding. In terms of the high school dd was still 100% classified as a high school student and it didn’t affect funding to the high school.
DD pays the cc to mail a transcript to any school/program that requires a transcript. It cost about $4.00. The high school was able to have dd get one signed/sealed copy to put on naviance but she had to mail one directly to the college she choose both at the end of senior year first semester and the end of her senior year. Other than that I paid about $30 to buy a lab book that dd could write in.
In terms of acceptance dd picked her school without knowing what colleges would accept what. She is going to a private college. She did not get an associates but has the same amount of credits an associates would require. After we paid for her to go there was the first time they officially look at and evaluated her dual enrollment classes. We were very surprised that they gave her credit for every single class she took. A few of them are free electives though which honestly don’t do anything to help/hurt if your goal is to graduate earlier. She is officially entering as a junior but in reality is a freshman with advance credit standing. She will need to repeat English if she wants an honors diploma but they won’t accept AP English for that either. We anticipate that in reality she will take 3 years to graduate since she may want to do a double major, study abroad, start grad courses etc. My pocketbook says it will be nice to to save a semester or two of tuition but our attitude is we will see where it leads and appreciate the options.