- November 19, 2024
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The Flagler School District is preparing to open up parents' options to transfer children from one school to another, through the School Choice program.
“It used to be that you had to have an identifiable reason; it couldn’t just be that you thought another school was better,” Flagler Schools Student Services Director Katrina Townsend said during a presentation at a Tuesday workshop of the Flagler County School Board. Many of those applications were denied.
Under a draft proposal Townsend presented at the meeting, though, parents would no longer need to state a reason to transfer a child to a new school.
The change is in part a response to a problem with the current policy, Townsend said.
District staff started noticing that a number of parents who applied for school transfers and were denied didn’t keep their children in their home-zone school. They pulled them out for home schooling, often noting the reason on the form required when parents remove a child from the school system.
Those cases spurred a review of the district’s School Choice procedure, Townsend said.
The proposed new policy would still have some restrictions, in part because of state and federal law.
“We do have a state statute which drives School Choice,” Townsend said. “The schools have to have capacity to do that, the schools have to be able to maintain class size and they have to be able to maintain a diverse enrollment.”
School choice transfers couldn’t interfere with federally-mandated desegregation measures, she said.
And parents couldn’t use the School Choice option to get a child out of disciplinary measures like suspensions, or transfer a child who has severe discipline problems, is enrolled in an intervention program or is behind their grade level.
Schools could review a transferred student for removal back to their home school if the student has repeated unexcused absences — five or more — or violates certain school rules.
And at this point, Townsend said, parents who wanted to move their child to a new school would have to provide the child’s transportation.
School Board member Colleen Conklin, speaking by speakerphone because she was out of town, suggested the board consider providing transportation to students transferring out of their home-zone school.
“My hope would be that we would have conversations, maybe not now but in the future, that if we have a child that, say, lives far, far away from Matanzas High School, and they want to go into the environmental academy, and they don’t have transportation, that we would be able to talk about shuttling,” she said. “When you talk about choice, if you’re really going to do it, it has to be choice for everyone.”
Assistant Superintendent Jacob Oliva said those options might come later. The district has reduced its transportation costs because of budget cuts, he said, and would have to plan for the expense of a shuttle.
“We’re trying to be more flexible and more customer-service oriented by opening up choice availability to as many families as we can,” he said. “Our philosophy is that we’re adapting, and that we’ll give any family and any student a chance to be successful in a school that might be different from their home-zone school.”
The board directed Townsend to move forward with the draft proposal.
The district will accept school choice applications Feb. 24 to April 11, and also during an application period in the summer.
