Public schools offer parents choices, but there are limits and waiting lists

In an effort to give parents greater choice in their child’s education, public school districts in Georgia have come up with a variety of options from magnets to charters to transfers.

But the zeal for choice has outstripped the options in some districts. AJC education writer Rose French reports DeKalb has seen a steady increase in transfer applicants. For school year 2013-14, the system received approximately 14,750 applications, with 5,500 approved. For the latest school year, 2015-16, French found there were 16,000 applications, with nearly 6,400 approved.

110125 Atlanta: Signs were everywhere Tuesday during the rally. Hundreds of parents and students attended the School Choice Celebration and Rally at the Georgia State Capitol Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2011. The gathering rallied to push state lawmakers to expand educational options for Georgia families. The event joined together unlikely allies, public and private school leaders in a display of unity where they urged lawmakers to expand scholarship opportunities so parents can better afford to pick their children's schools. Private schools want the state to raise the $50 million cap on the tax-credit scholarship that has helped hundreds of public school students transfer to private schools. Charter school officials want the state to support the continued funding of their campuses, which faces a state Supreme Court challenge from a handful of Georgia public school systems. The rally comes as the country celebrates National School Choice Week. David Pusey, director of a Center for an Educated Georgia, said more metro Atlanta parents appear to be concerned about choice than ever before, especially with accreditation problems at Atlanta Public Schools. John Spink jspink@ajc.com Her own experiences finding the right education fit for her child turned an Atlanta attorney into a school choice proponent. (AJC photo)

Credit: Maureen Downey

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Credit: Maureen Downey

Ditto for Cobb where French learned the district received 999 applications for the 2012-2013 school year and accommodated 672. For the 2015-2016 school year, the district received 2,794 applications and can accommodate 1,768.

Here is an excerpt from French's MyAJC.com story on the challenges parents face when they want to make a choice outside their zoned school:

By Rose French

In many districts, more students are applying to transfer to high-performing schools than the number of available spaces. "I don't think it's (school choice) a reality at all," said one frustrated Cobb County parent who said her transfer requests for her son and daughter were denied with little explanation.

As demand for choice increases, parents complain they are not told enough about how the schools make the decisions. School leaders in Cobb are reviewing their policies, and DeKalb officials have said changes are coming, after complaints from parents calling for greater transparency.

State legislation in recent years has pushed for more charter schools and alternatives to the traditional public school model, but state educators and others say they have not seen enough high-qualified groups applying for charter schools to fill the demand.

Cobb parents can apply to move their children out of poor-performing schools, but if they don't get in via the district's lottery system, they're put on a waiting list. However, parents say they're not told where they rank on the list and are rejected without knowing how school officials came to their decision.

In DeKalb, parents are angered by the selection process for the county's magnet schools and say they want to see the program expand or go away altogether. This year, a new computer-generated lottery system to select students for the magnet program omitted some students by mistakenly classifying them as living outside the district. For other students, the system dropped grades from their profile.

Telling parents where they rank on waiting lists and giving as much information as possible about the school-choice process is "fundamental," said Claire Smrekar, associate professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University, who has written extensively about school choice. "It gives most parents some degree of assurance that this system is fair, consistent.”

Cobb school board member David Morgan says schools should have uniform criteria or a formula for deciding if they have space for children trying to transfer, and Cobb schools don't.

Parents sometimes face desperate decisions trying to get their children out of failing schools. Karen Armstrong says she had little choice but to sign over temporary guardianship of her son to her sister, to keep him attending a high-performing school in East Cobb. Armstrong moved from East Cobb to Powder Springs in South Cobb when she married nearly five years ago, and she said her middle school-age son was being bullied and not getting the attention he needed from teachers at the lower-performing South Cobb school. So her son went to live with her sister for a year so he could finish out middle school in East Cobb.

Armstrong said she has also tried to get her 6-year-old daughter into higher-performing schools outside her attendance zone and been denied. Armstrong and other parents argue that if a certain number of students want to get into a school, education officials should accommodate them with space and enough teachers so class sizes do not get too big.

Morgan points out that Cobb doesn't consider trailers on school property as available "space" but says they should. "As a parent, if I make a choice that a particular school is in my child's best interest, and there's a phenomenal teacher that happens to be teaching in a trailer, put my child there."

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