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I am posting a bleg because maybe KTM readers know people who know the answer, or know how to find out the answers.
Short version, wherever you are: do you know what the law says in your city/state/district when your neighborhood school is over capacity? Does the school district have the legal right to move your child to any school they see fit? What recourse, if any, do you have, to keep your child in your neighborhood school? Can they be sued to expand? Sued for denying your kid a space there? What are the rules? I'd hate to be in the position where I mortgaged my future to buy a house in a specific district/neighborhood, thereby preventing me from affording private school, only to find out my kid can't go there after all.
Someone I'm close to is in that position. They recently moved their family to a house in Los Angeles because it was specifically within a certain LAUSD school's neighborhood, and they wanted to send their child to that school. The school is Fairburn Avenue Elementary. The child in question will be starting kindergarten in the fall.
That school has been crowded recently. Last year, they added an additional K class, but still did not accommodate the numbers, and an entire class were moved to another school. This year, the school has decided not to bother. Their argument? They can't accommodate them in the higher grades (2nd, 3rd... the school goes up to 5th) in those facilities anyway. BTW, LAUSD recently decided that classroom size matters, so no k-3 will have more than 20 students. look how well that's working!
Here was the statement by the school:
"LAUSD will allow 300 students in K through 3 and due to the large class sizes for next years 2nd and 3rd grade classes, we will have only 3 K classes next year. That means only 60 Kindergarten students. They will be admitted first come first serve so if you have incoming Kindergarteners next year, please show up on the first Monday in May to pick up the paperwork to enroll your children.... If more than 60 children enroll in Kindergarten, Warner is projected to be able to take up to 16 of the latest to enroll. Any kids enrolling beyond those 16 will be accommodated at another, not yet decided upon, school."
how nice. so, is this common? Is this well known when it does occur? How often do parents find themselves in this kind of predicament? And is there anything that can be done about it?
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11 comments:
The district where I live (not the one I work in) is a mix of urban and rural. A nearby town is growing rapidly (doubled in less than 10 years, from about 12 000 to about 25 000) and even though they have built several new schools, including a new high school, the schools are all overcrowded. Some expansion of enrolment occurs by adding temporary buildings and trailers to the sites but even this has reached capacity. So a couple of new subdivisions, with very hefty price tags on the elegant homes, have large signs posted warning that children moving into the area will be bused to other schools (and a number to call).
I think they are accommodating siblings of children already enrolled but new families are warned up front that students will be transported elsewhere (there have been some public meetings about where "elsewhere" is -- the district wants to bus the kids to some under-enrolled inner-city urban schools about 10 miles away but naturally the parents, who moved to this "nice" community, do not want their kids bused back to the urban jungle).
I am not sure how they select the students who will make up entering Kindergarten classes in the overpopulated schools -- there must be some kind of lottery involved, as they need to balance genders more or less. Needless to say there are lots of UNHAPPY people! As far as I know however, the district is legally entitled to close enrolment at some point. This also happens when a school is renovated (a whole large elementary nearby was bused elsewhere for nearly two years while their school was repaired after flood or storm damage of some kind). When population growth occurs rapidly, the wheels of bureaucracy that get a new school built turn too slowly to accommodate the flow. The planners seem to want to wait until the new development stabilizes so they can plan more accurately.
The law is about health and safety...basically the district has to be in compliance with the fire code and be able to serve lunch. There is a probably a law or guideline about the ratio of restrooms to people too.
In general, our district will move the boundary lines within the district between any two adjacent elementary zones and attempt to make all schools equally crowded while testing the waters for building additions.
At the same time, art, band, and music will lose their rooms (band has at times been totally eliminated) and those classes that have gym during lunch will have gym in the classroom if the weather is too poor for outdoor gym. K will be half day instead of full day and simultaneously pre-K will be moved out of the building by using existing daycare centers. Other districts in the area have moved whole grades to different buildings. The choices all depend on the resources the district has to work with.
The last time we had your situation, the owners of the new McMansions were in areas where moving the boundary would have shifted them and their neighbors on the zone boundaries into a Title I elementary and given all affected a much shorter bus ride. That ele. didn't want to lose it's funding, the 'old' neighbors wanted to stay in the familiar school (and would have been allowed via the sibling rule), and the newbies didn't want Title 1, so compromises were made and the vote went for additions to all the overcrowded buildings in the district w/o having to move the zone boundaries.
The temporary bulge in attendence and the return of illegal immigrants to their home countries didn't end up leaving us with empty classrooms, because the withdrawal of state funding a few years later meant children who were in centralized district wide facilities were relocated to their neighborhood elementary.
Your friend should form a citizen's committee and get up a petition...
When we lived in CA, our first grade daughter and preschool son were enrolled in a private school. With the addition of our youngest, the prospect of paying more than two grand a month in tuition was overwhelming and we decided to move to a district with very good public schools instead. We purchased our house in the summer, I ran over to our designated elementary school to enroll my daughter in second grade for the fall and was told they were full. There was no room at the inn.
The only option was to have our daughter attend another school in the district and hope that by third grade there might be a space for her. We ended up keeping her at the private school and that was that.
I don't think it's uncommon practice for this to happen particularly in districts with a good reputation. The schools are bound by class size limits, health and safety code laws and classroom availability.
A petition is a wonderful idea, the problem is that change happens so slowly. By the time things actually change, this child may be ready to move on to middle school. Hopefully your friend gets in the "first 60" to enroll and is one of the lucky ones. It's a little hard to believe that they are enrolling on a first come first serve (unless they expect very few over the 60 available slots) as that could be extreme chaos. I'm imagining people camping out for nights before May 1st, tempers flaring, and a very angry number 61. At least a lottery system is random.
Our district popped up some annex buildings next to the building. They stayed up for a couple of years and then went down. It's not perfect, but I would rather that than for the kid to be bussed to another school altogether.
SusanS
My current district has requested portable classrooms to deal with the overcrowding but even that proposal is at least two years out. In the meantime we just have to deal with it (no bussing thank goodness).
I guess the school Allison is talking about moved at least 20 families to another school at the outset of the school year and bussing is a possibility as well. LAUSD won't be building new schools because the deomographics predict drops in enrollment. It's the transition period that's going to be a reall bugger for awhile. Portable classrooms would probably be the best interim solution it would seem.
We have used portables, but they are expensive and if the trend continues, you're going to have to build anyway.
I doubt many schools will go with a lottery approach for one reason -- buses.
If kids in one neighborhood go to different schools, then you end up with multiple buses on a single street.
Continuing our trend of reducing parental options, we get no choice. When overcrowding at one elementary school threatens class size guidelines, an entire street or neighborhood is "redistricted." They usually end up moving one busload of kids to the less crowded school. There are "swing" streets that might go to one school or the other depending on enrollment.
We had lots of modulars here; then we built a $40-million dollar middle school, completed a couple of years ago.
Now we have declining enrollments.
Budget still going up.
First, LAUSD is building new classrooms, just not anywhere near here, even though LAUSD is losing students overall. They haven't building a new school in the west side of LA in over 25 years. They are still building in other areas. They have a 20 billion dollar bond measure for it, in fact.
Second, fire/safety/occupancy aren't the issues. The class size reduction "rule" meant that they cut the number of students to 20 per class, when they had 30-40 previously, and since they didn't add more rooms, well, gee, guess how well that works.
re: portables: they don't want portables because they don't want to feed more kids into the school, period, apparently, because since they reduced class size with a magic wand but that wand didn't create facilities, they would need portables for the next 12 years...
And they aren't even giving sibling preference in their "first come, first served" model.
I'm unsure why a lottery is worse than the first-come model re: busing. what's the difference, if they are going to have to bus all the kids that aren't in the school anyway? not like the latercomers are organized by street block, either.
The camping-out seems to be the plan--added to that, is the cute quirk that the child must be present for registration. So the plan is camping out for the night before with one parent, while the other parent keeps the kid and gets child ready for the morning enrollment.
Thanks for the input! I'm learning a great deal. and yet another reason I count my blessings that I don't live in CA anymore.
I had read (LATimes, I think) that they were scaling down the building plans by 18 schools due to shifts in the demographics. But you're right, they still plan on building 132 new schools and there's another $20million bond measure on the November ballot, I think.
I imagine it's a challenge to find somewhere to build on the west side, but 25 years without a new school? Oh boy!
The construction is going to take at least five years to complete so the overcrowding situation will be around for awhile it seems. If the schools aren't being built where they are most needed, even 132 new schools aren't going to be the answer. are they? I wonder how they determine where these new schools go?
BTW, LAUSD recently decided that classroom size matters, so no k-3 will have more than 20 students.
The 20 student limit (in all classes up to 3rd grade) is a matter of California state law, passed on a ballot initiative that was heartily supported by the teachers' unions.
HOW a district gets to that number is completely up to the district. They can do a lottery, magnet schools, whatever system (not withstanding any court-order de-segregation plans) they come up with.
Ben,
Thanks for that info. I've been reading a lot of LAT stories and LAUSD docs, and never saw that it was a state mandate, let alone an idiotic ballot measure. That changes things slightly, and reminds me yet again why I'm so happy not to live in CA...
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