Group Protests School Transfer Policy

"The day after the redistricting was announced, there was a huge stack of transfer forms sitting on the front counter at the school office," he said. "People came up to my wife and me and offered to let us use their addresses. This is a big underground culture, and we're all waiting for the first day of school to see how people will play their cards."

Ron Cipressi, a member of the parent group and a father of two, said: "We want to do this the right way, but there's just no way. They have left us no choice. You have to do a transfer just like everyone else. They have pushed it to that."

Other counties in the region have confronted the challenge of balancing the day-care needs of working parents with the interest of keeping children at schools near their home. In Anne Arundel County, 1,849 students transferred for day-care reasons during the past year, in St. Mary's County about 500 transferred.

Montgomery County school officials sought to limit such transfers in the 1990s after concluding that the practice contributed to crowding. Today, the school system does not consider day-care concerns alone sufficient justification for a transfer.

In Fairfax County, parents have to prove that they were unable to find day care near their home before they are allowed to transfer their children. But that happens quite often, and school officials approved 2,354 such elementary school transfers last year, said Cindy Dickinson, coordinator of the Office of Student Services.

"We really don't want people to, so to speak, shop around for a school using child care," Dickinson said. "We don't want it to be an automatic thing. They need to at least show us they tried."

In Calvert, school board members said the redistricting decision is final, but members of the parent group said they plan to keep fighting it and the transfer policies. "This whole thing has really blown up," parent Craig Brogan said.