Group Protests School Transfer Policy
Link to Day Care Gives Advantage to Two-Income Families, Some Parents Say

By Jenna Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 12, 2008

A new parent group in Calvert County is protesting a policy that allows children to attend elementary schools close to their day-care centers, an arrangement that the group says unfairly lets some families place their children in the county's best schools.

The parents say the transfer policy has led to crowding in those schools, which are clustered near the many day-care centers along the main commuter artery in northern Calvert.

The school system has redistricted its elementary schools four times in the past decade.

"Our kids are getting bumped to another school so that people with two-income households can pick where their kids go," said parent Nick Myers of Huntingtown, in northern Calvert. "It's just not fair to the families who stretch their budgets so one parent can stay home."

As in many of the region's school systems, Calvert officials say they allow such transfers because they want to accommodate working parents and reduce the time children spend traveling between school and a day-care provider. During the past school year, Calvert approved 551 elementary school transfer requests, nearly all of which were related to day care.

The latest redistricting was approved in March to prepare for the opening of a school. Among other shifts, it will push about 100 children in the Queensberry development in Huntingtown from Plum Point Elementary School, one of the county's top schools, farther south to Calvert Elementary School.

Nearly 90 parents, most from Queensberry, recently formed a group called Neighbors for Sensible School Redistricting. At a recent Board of Education meeting, about two dozen of them protested the latest redistricting. They say that without the day-care transfers, their local school would not be as crowded and that the new school and the redistricting would be unnecessary.

School officials have said population growth is responsible for the crowding in northern Calvert. Schools spokeswoman Gail Hoerauf-Bennett said the school system approves legitimate transfer requests.

Even so, parents critical of Calvert's policy say the six elementary schools in the north, which receive most of the transfer students, are the county's six highest-performing in state testing assessments. They also have the largest concentrations of white students and the lowest percentages of students who receive free or reduced-price lunches.

The parents group has appealed to the state Board of Education, seeking to have the redistricting thrown out and a new transfer policy instituted. The group has also asked a Circuit Court judge to temporarily block the redistricting and filed an ethics complaint against one of the local school board members.

School board members and school system officials declined to comment on the legal challenges and are proceeding with the redistricting.

Meyers said he expects that his daughter, who would have been a first-grader this fall at Plum Point, will be moved to another school under the redistricting. Parents confronted by the redistricting have gone to long lengths to keep their children in top-notch schools, he said, strategically enrolling them in certain day-care centers or lying about their addresses.

"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.