Last night we got some clarity around the District’s enrollment procedures and the legal parameters we work under given we are a charter school district. Without going into detail, suffice is to say we learned we have limited flexibility in how we can give enrollment preferences for our schools. This surfaced as an issue because a number of “charter families” (families who live outside of the SCSD boundaries) were upset because their children who were siblings of existing students already enrolled did not get into the school last year. This mostly affected Heather School. The Board wanted to debate whether or not to change its policy to give a higher preference to these siblings (a notion of “once a family is in, they are in”).
So although we started to have that debate (and to be frank, there was some disagreement on the board about this notion), it turned out to be a moot point. Charter school law is very specific by saying we must essentially give first preference to the children living within “the former attendance” area of that school, and then secondarily to children living within the boundaries of the District. So, we eseentially confirmed the current practice which has been to admit children in the following order of priority:
1. Current Returning students
2. Siblings of current SCSD resident students
3. SCSD Intra-District requests (e.g. a White Oaks resident wanting to go to Brittan Acres)
4. Children of SCSD Employees (we established this by policy last year)
5. Siblings of current charter (out of district) students
6. New charter (out of district) students
Due to all of the confusion in the community and the eagerness to address this issue, I suggested that the Superintendent take a fairly proactive approach in communicating with the Heather community, as it affects not only the specific charter families, but all of the families at that school, many of whom have expressed an interest in not “breaking up” our guest families. I suspect the Heather community will hear from the administration soon on this.
By the way, none of what we learned altered what we did last week to change the Hidden Valley boundary — we were definitely withing our power to do that.
We also learned another very interesting thing. Because of charter school law, current attendance trumps all (#1 above), regardless of where you live. In other words, if a 2nd grader at Arundel moves out of the District the summer after second grade, they still get to return to 3rd grade if they choose to. Their new residence is now irrelevant. However, this preference does not hold when a child goes from Elementary School to Middle School. So, a Redwood City student who has been with us from K-4 effectively goes to Priority #5 or #6 when they go to middle school, although we all agreed the District should make every effort to accomodate that child if possible.
Also — in full disclosure, since Central Middle School is not a charter school, it works a little differently for them, but the principles are essentially the same. It is a very complex — and in many cases — untested area of the law.
The Board also confirmed that it wants the sub-committee on boundaries and enrollment to meet again and come back to the Board within the next few months with recommendations on potential boundary changes or other solutions to meet our enrollment capacity issues.
