This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, June 28, 2013: Cooperating School Districts will act as a clearinghouse for students who live in Riverview Gardens and Normandy and want to transfer to accredited school districts under a law recently upheld by the Missouri Supreme Court.
Meeting Friday at the CSD offices near Creve Coeur, superintendents agreed to the system under which students seeking to transfer can submit applications by Aug. 1, starting with their home district. Once their residency in one of the two unaccredited school districts is verified, the application will be sent to CSD, which will then work to match them with the district they want to attend.
Don Senti, head of the organization, said students will be asked to list their first, second and third choice, and CSD will do its best to try to place them with the district where they would like to attend class.
“We expect all students who want to transfer will be able to transfer,” he said after the meeting.
The two districts closest to Normandy and Riverview Gardens – Hazelwood and Ferguson-Florissant – will not be part of the combined process, though they were part of the discussions that set it up. Representative of both districts said that because they are most familiar with the area, they felt they could handle the transfers more easily on their own.
Under the law, the district where a student lives – even if he or she has not been attending public schools in the district – must pay tuition to the receiving accredited district. Both Normandy and Riverview Gardens must designate one district to which they would pay transportation costs as well.
Key to the process, Senti said, are guidelines issued by the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Though they don’t have the force of law, they are designed to help determine how the transfers will be handled.
Under the guidelines, accredited districts in St. Louis County or an adjacent county should post on their websites a student transfer application, the district admissions process and the number of slots available in each grade. Districts were advised to institute an admissions process “to ensure all applicants an equal chance of admission.”
In Hazelwood, Julia Burke-Thorpe, assistant superintendent for student services, said handling the transfer process on its own would make it easier for families who want to transfer to the district’s schools.
“That’s what this is all about,” she told the Beacon after the superintendents’ meeting Friday.
She noted that the district has been heavily involved in all the meetings leading up to Friday’s announcement, including chairing a subcommittee to devise a common application. She said that so far, 241 students had called Hazelwood inquiring about a transfer.
“Our families will be able to contact directly,” Burke-Thorpe said. “As a north county district, we are used to handling the enrollment process. We have lots of students who move in and out of the district during the school year, so we’re used to this process. We do this all the time.”
Ferguson-Florissant Superintendent Art McCoy had a similar view about why his district would be working on its own to handle transfer applications.
“Some other districts are far away,” he said of where potential transfer students could go. “We know the area fairly well. We work well with surrounding districts and have a good support system. We feel we can do it best and maintain local control.”
He said he didn’t have an exact number of calls Ferguson-Florissant has received about potential transfers. Asked if his district would be able to accommodate all students who want to go there, he replied:
“We’re going to comply with the law fully. We don’t intend to have any process where we will discriminate or say you can’t come.”
And if the district’s classes get too full? McCoy said he would be willing to consider even using facilities in one of the unaccredited districts to house students who would get a Ferguson-Florissant education.
“If we run out of space,” he said, “I’m interested in out-of-the-box solutions that may not have been mentioned yet. We are definitely interested in providing a quality education. That’s the key.”
Financial impacts
Without hard numbers of how many students will transfer, where they will go and how much the districts will charge for tuition, figuring the financial impact of the transfer law on the receiving and the unaccredited districts is not easy. But Senti used this example to show how the sending districts might be affected:
The average size of an elementary school class in St. Louis County is 23 students, and most schools have three classes for each grade. If three kids from each class want to transfer, and the school goes from kindergarten through sixth grade, that is 63 students.
If the receiving district charges $10,000 in tuition, that would mean for each elementary school affected, the sending district would have to pay $630,000, not including transportation costs. But the school would still have 60 students in each grade, so it would not be able to cut expenses by having one fewer teacher, because that would make each class 30 students – too large for an elementary school, particularly in districts already struggling academically.
Add in similar costs for middle schools and high schools, plus the residents of a district who don’t go to public schools now but are entitled to transfer, and Senti said the financial impact of the court’s ruling could be devastating to the unaccredited districts.
“I just don’t think anybody has done the math,” he said. “This is finally becoming real. Kids are actually going to transfer, and Normandy and Riverview Gardens are probably not going to be able to pay the bills.”
Senti appreciates the guidelines issued by DESE, adding:
“I wish they’d been sent out two years ago.”
Senti thinks that the reality of the situation this fall will put added pressure on lawmakers to come up with a more practical solution to the transfer dilemma when they reconvene in January.
Kansas City schools also are unaccredited, but district officials there say they are putting possible transfers on hold until another court case on the topic is decided.
No history of district bankruptcy
Lynn Beckwith, who heads the special administrative board appointed for Riverview Gardens when the state took the district over in 2010, said that the board approved a $69 million budget earlier this week. But with revenue unable to cover expenses, it will have no other option than to dip into its reserves.
“There comes a point of diminishing returns,” he said, “and you won’t have the money to keep all the staff that you did before. It would be impossible to maintain any type of quality program. The money only goes so far.”
He said the district – where a new superintendent, Scott Spurgeon, takes over on Monday – is checking with its legal counsel and trying to understand the nuances of the Missouri Supreme Court ruling. He said the district will comply with what the court said, “but it certainly left a lot of questions unanswered.”
One of those questions, Beckwith said, is how the district is supposed to pay tuition for students who leave and still have enough money to provide education for students who stay.
“We are spending $9,400 a year on each student,” he said. “If we just pay that out for 100 students, it would be catastrophic in my judgment.
“The state took over Riverview Gardens School District. In my judgment, it would be partially the state’s responsibility to help decide how the district could survive financially. We know that if your fund balance goes to a particular level, you go on the financially stressed list. What happens then, I don’t know.”
Beckwith doesn’t expect any help from Jefferson City. On Friday, Gov. Jay Nixon announced $400 million in withholdings from the state budget, including $66.4 million from the foundation formula for K-12 schools.
“I don’t think the legislature is in the mind of giving us any relief,” Beckwith said. “I think their position might be, get your scores up, then you’ll get relief.”
Ron Lankford, deputy commissioner for education, says no Missouri school district has ever filed for bankruptcy. He said state law provides for districts to lapse if they are no longer able to provide an education for their students, and they are not allowed to engage in deficit spending.
If districts can’t afford to educate their students, Lankford said, DESE would step in.
“Our first priority as an agency would be to find a home for the kids, then find reimbursement for the kids,” he said. “It would be a cumbersome situation, and we hope it doesn’t happen, but it is a possibility.”
Guidelines criticized
The guidelines that DESE issued to help districts sort through the transfer thicket were welcomed by some, though the department was quick to point out that they were simply suggestions on ways to handle transfers, not hard and fast rules.
But Elkin Kistner, the lawyer who represented the families that sought to transfer from unaccredited districts under the law, was unimpressed. He said the suggestion that accredited districts could set up admissions policies and possibly not have to accept all students who sought to transfer does not comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“There is no exception in the statute for a receiving district that thinks it is going to be overwhelmed,” he told the Beacon. “I’m not saying that’s great. But until such time as the legislature changes the statute, what the Supreme Court is saying is that it’s your job to deal with it. You can’t imagine exceptions that don’t exist.”
As far as possible changes to the law, Kistner noted that everyone apparently thought the courts would handle the situation, so he doesn’t necessarily expect much now.
“Everybody been wringing their hands and gnashing their teeth over this since 2007,” he said. “You’d think the legislature would have been more proactive than that, for something that was a social problem in Missouri.”
And he isn’t too pleased with the guidelines sent out by DESE, either.
“There’s just a lot of mystery around them,” Kistner said. “If they are guidelines that have some persuasive force from this regulatory agency, I don’t know how you reconcile them with the law and the Supreme Court’s decision.
“I fully realize that the statute as it is currently drafted doesn’t provide much guidance, and nobody on my side has ever argued that it is a perfect statute. But it’s the only game in town right now. So I’m puzzled by this thing that DESE did. But there’s no reason for me to believe today that I should be any less puzzled than I was seven years ago. I’m used to it.”