Despite the resistance and controversy surrounding the inter-district student transfer program for students in the Normandy and Riverview Gardens school districts, a recent legislative report and proposed legislation suggest some modified version of the program is here to stay.
The House Interim Committee on Education traveled to 11 sites throughout Missouri during September and October, hearing testimony from 196 individuals before issuing its report last week. That report, along with bills expected in the upcoming Missouri legislative session that begins January 8, suggest the state statute that allows inter-district transfers for students residing in unaccredited school districts might be tweaked or fine-tuned, but it won’t be reversed.
“A complete reversal is very unlikely,” says Republican Rep. Rich Stream of Kirkwood. “There may be a bill—and I’m not sure who would file it—that would say to repeal it and not have anything to replace it, but that’s probably not going to happen because there’s too much interest in trying to help these kids in unaccredited districts.”
Stream, who before being elected to the House of Representatives served on the Kirkwood School Board, has a bill that he plans to introduce in the upcoming session. He's also the chairman of the House Budget Committee.
From the nonprofit side, Kate Casas of the Children’s Education Alliance of Missouri, predicts no substantive change will be made to the transfer program. Her group promotes giving students more choice in attending school. If changes are made to the program, she says, there should be a “one-for-one replacement,” so no child loses the right that he or she has to transfer to an accredited district. “Any changes that may be made should not result in kids losing their right to go somewhere else,” Casas says. “Once children have a right to go somewhere else, taking that right away from them would be cruel.”
The transfer program was the lead topic for many of the meetings held by the interim committee. The report issued 12 “findings,” with the first dealing with the transfer program. Several “areas of consensus” were listed, including establishing a formula for the tuition paid to a receiving district, giving the receiving district “some control over their circumstances,” helping districts avoid losing accreditation, and giving districts extra assistance if they do lose accreditation.
Stream’s bill would address all of those concerns. The first part of the bill would allow the receiving district to set limits on how many students it would accept. Those limits would be based on current class sizes and building capacity, as that information is filed with the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. That would set in place an equation that would determine how many students each district could accept.
The second part of the bill would change the funding mechanism, so the per-student “tuition” paid by the unaccredited district to the receiving district would be a set amount and not vary by district. Riverview Gardens, for instance, pays about $8,500 for each student it sends to Mehville; Normandy pays about $11,000 for each student it sends to Francis Howell. In each case, that amount is less than it would cost the unaccredited district if the student had stayed in Riverview Gardens or Normandy. One example of a set tuition for a transfer program is the ongoing school desegregation plan, which has the city pay suburban districts about $7,200 per student, no matter where the student attends school.
The other two parts of Stream’s bill would address preventing districts from becoming unaccredited and allowing more choices to students who choose to remain in their districts of residence. “The kids left behind deserve alternatives; they deserve access to a quality education right now, not two or five years from now,” Stream says. “They should be allowed to go to some other place, whether it’s a charter school, a private school, or a parochial school. They have to be given some option. That’s going to be most difficult part of the bill I plan to file.”
In previous legislative attempts to address the inter-district transfer program, bills failed to pass because opponents lined up due to controversial aspects of the bill. Stream’s bill would limit charter schools and other choice options to unaccredited districts. Currently, charter schools are only operating in the City of St. Louis and Kansas City.
A campaign to authorize tax credits that would benefit private and parochial schools is being supported by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis, which has contributed $300,000 to the Missourians for Children’s Education in an effort to put a ballot initiative before voters in November 2014. Donors to a nonprofit entity would receive tax credits, and that entity would provide financial aid to private and parochial students. Under the plan, some of the donated money would benefit public schools.
Casas says her group has not taken any position on the ballot initiative, though the Children’s Education Alliance of Missouri “in general supports the idea of private school choice.” She says the current inter-district transfer program shows that new approaches can work. “It didn’t cause the kind of chaos that everybody was trying to brace for,” she says. “The kids are settled, they’re doing fine, and the school districts are treating them well. It’s back to business as usual as far as educating kids.
“From the prospective of the parents I’ve spoken with, parents whose children are transfers, they’re certainly happy,” Casas adds. “There is always a bit of anxiety about how long it’s going to last.”
According to Stream, that anxiety for those 2,200 students who transferred should not be too high. What happens next for provisionally accredited districts or those districts that end up losing their accreditation is another matter. “The goal is to get every child access to a quality education,” says Stream. “That’s my goal. How we get there is difficult. There's a lot of interests involved, from what I call the education establishment: the school board association, the school administrator association, the teachers' union, DESE. They all have their own opinions about different facets of the problem.” Stream says the focus needs to remain on what is best for the students in school, “not necessarily for adults and jobs."
During his travels throughout the state and meetings, Stream did see that the majority of school districts perform well and do a good job. “They want to be left alone,” he says, "other than giving them more money.”
