This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Aug. 1, 2013: The Mehlville School District is so far the first choice of more than 600 students seeking to transfer from the unaccredited Riverview Gardens School District.
That number poses a problem for Mehlville, which says it can accommodate only about 150 of those students. The law allows students from unaccredited districts to transfer to accredited schools in the same or in an adjacent county.
As of Wednesday, 2,356 students in Riverview Gardens and Normandy have requested to transfer to accredited districts as far away as St. Charles County and as close to home as St. Louis. Riverview Gardens has agreed to pick up transportation expenses for transfers to Mehlville and Kirkwood; Normandy is paying for transportation to Francis Howell. Some parents in the two unaccredited districts have already decided to cover the transportation expenses to send their children to other districts.
The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has issued guidelines advising accredited districts to evaluate how many transfer students they can accommodate and publish those numbers and an admissions policy on their website.
But the law doesn’t seem to answer the question growing out of the situation in Mehlville and possibly Kirkwood: Who verifies the accuracy of a district’s numbers on capacity or available space for transfer students?
State school officials “don’t have the legal authority“ to tell districts “you’ve set your capacity too low or too high,” according to Sarah Potter, a DESE spokesperson. She says the state agency advises districts to define capacity on the basis of class sizes, with 18 students the low number for a class and 25 students being the high number.
Sherrie Wehner, chief marketing officer for the Cooperating School Districts of Greater St. Louis, agrees that verification of capacity is beyond the scope of the law.
“It’s up to the individual school district and the school board to audit and police their own data,” she says. “The school districts are responsible and accountable for establishing how many kids they can take by grades, schools and buildings.”
The issue takes on major importance on Friday morning when all schools involved in the student transfer program will meet, with the Cooperating School District present “as an impartial third party.” The purpose: to decide in which districts the students will be placed.
The Cooperating School Districts will have all the paperwork on all potential transfer students by grade level. The paperwork will include the student’s first, second and third choices of districts to which to tranfer.
“Then we will start to slot those kids in all of the schools based on the schools that they requested and the capacity of those schools,” Wehner says.
Once the group knows how many transfer students a district can accommodate, students will be randomly chosen to fill those slots.
“Let’s say there are 50 third graders who have requested transfers to Mehlville, and Mehlville comes in and says it can take 40. Forty will be randomly chosen, and parents of the rest will get phone calls explaining that their children didn’t get their first choice and will be asked whether they want us to go to the second or third choice. We keep doing that until a student is placed in a district.”
So does that mean districts in the region have enough spaces to accommodate all kids requesting transfer?
“I believe we do,” Wehner says. “But what I cannot confirm is that we have enough spaces in the school districts for which transportation will be paid. We already know today that there are more kids requesting transfers to Mehlville than Mehlville believes it has capacity for, which is why there is now a second choice of Kirkwood.”
In one scenario, she says, parents might be called and informed that Mehlville is full and asked if they would “like us to try to slot the kid in Kirkwood. They may say they’ll keep the child in Riverview or they may say that they’ll pay transportation on their own to send the kid to the Pattonville District, for example.”
Will many parents trying to get their kids out of a failing district end up having to cover the transportation bill?
“Maybe and maybe not,” Wehner says. “What might happen and I don’t know that it will, but there is a possibility that if Kirkwood fills up, Riverview Gardens might select a third district to which it will pay transportation. That’s a possibility but, unfortunately at this moment, I don’t know if it will happen.”
Based on data compiled by the Cooperating District, the two unaccredited districts can expect to pay at least $30 million for tuition and transportation for students transferring to Francis Howell and Mehlville. No data were available immediately for Kirkwood.
The data also show that so far, nearly 78 percent of students in Normandy and 80 percent of those in Riverview Gardens intend to continue attending schools in their home districts.
